ABSTRACT
As a consequence of political solutions following World War II, Europe was divided into two parts: its large Central Eastern part was isolated from the Central Western one. For more than four decades, exchanges of people and ideas between East and West were intentionally blocked. Psychiatry in Central Eastern Europe is thought to have existed under the strong in¯uence of a speci®c Soviet orientation, including psychiatry's abuse for political purposes. At the time of the falling of the Berlin Wall, a symbol of the lifting of the Iron Curtain, the popular assessment of mental health care in the East described it as being 50 years behind the West. This opinion placed Eastern European psychiatry in a position somewhat like that of the mental patient for decades isolated from social life and in an asylum, and diagnosed as suffering from hospitalism. Certainly a feeling of isolation was predominant amongst psychiatrists in Central Eastern European countries and this generated a strong orientation towards knowledge and skills coming from the West. Some have assumed that the approach to schizophrenia treatment had developed in Eastern European countries in a single speci®c way, forgetting the number of countries and the many language differences.
