ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an empirical example of social problems activities, a controversy that developed out of efforts to publicize the use of psychiatry to control political dissidents in the Soviet Union. In January of 1971, Vladimir Bukovsky, a twenty-nine-year-old dissident Soviet biologist, sent to England the secret psychiatric dossiers of six Soviet dissidents he said were being held in Soviet mental hospitals because of their political beliefs. Other participants in the controversy were also looking toward the impending world congress as a forum for the issue of political misuse of psychiatry. Initiated by the Ad Hoc Committee to Study Conflicts Inherent in the Therapeutic and Institutional Role of Psychiatry, the research will focus on psychiatrists who work for institutions, such as state hospitals, prisons and private industry, and who experience conflicting pressures in their work to abandon their role as the patients' agent and to use their skills to serve institutional purposes.
