Mental health policy and practice across Europe: an overview

404 Mental health policy and practice
today have not been openly exposed as political and scientific fraud. The
instrument for such social practice – science as a paradigm based on evidence of
an agreed type, and its interpretation within scientific discourse – had been
effectively abolished and its recovery has not yet taken place.
The Soviet view on disability
With proper scientific discourse on mental health out of the way, an important
instrument for testing the realities of political leadership had been eliminated,
thus allowing notions of social policy to deviate from human decency beyond
anything modern societies have faced or have been able to admit to being possible.
The hallmark of this policy was to maintain and reinforce dependency, a
strategy presumed to postpone indefinitely the removal from power of those
who had usurped it forcefully. Aspects of human nature that were inconvenient
to the cultivation of eternal dependency had to be eliminated without any
respect for human rights whatsoever. The architects of ‘Soviet Man’ did not
even spare the trust of children, as attested by the children’s stories from the
period. Books suggested that the party was by far a more enduring, reliable and
trustworthy parent than a biological parent could ever be.
Loss, grief and sadness had no place in the newly-constructed human nature:
hence, human decline, either physical or mental, was regarded as depravity. The
combination of a ‘scientific’ interpretation of mental life as tantamount to the
physiology of the higher nervous system, and the view that disability was base,
could allow for the complete disavowal of the medical, social and vocational
needs of people with disabilities.
The system of institutional care was predicated by this attitude. It did not
provide for recovery and social integration: it was, by design, a way to eliminate
those who had become a nuisance and who were dispensable. In 1980, when
the Soviet Union organized the Olympic Games in Moscow, it was suggested
that the Paralympics be held there as well. The Soviets answered curtly: ‘We
have no invalids’. Indeed, people with physical disabilities were hardly ever
seen on the streets: understandably so, because only one factory (in Zaporozhe,
now in the Ukraine) produced wheelchairs, and these were of very poor quality.
Individuals who had lost their legs in wars or were paralysed could leave their
homes only by using a board with wheels and wooden clogs to propel themselves
forward. The ‘Action Group to Defend the Rights of the Disabled’, which
was established in 1980 to set up a Disabled Union, met with repression from
the secret police; within a year its members were jailed, forced into emigration
or put under constant surveillance.
Care for the ‘substandard’
Institutional care for children in need of parental care and for people with intellectual
disabilities and mental illness is an old European tradition that was introduced
to prevent abuse and even the violent death of these vulnerable people
where communities were not reliably governed by the concerns of human