The project is an extensive inquiry into the revival of repressive psychiatry in Russia: a practice involving medically unwarranted mental health diagnosis, treatment, and confinement of citizens for political reasons. Applied widely earlier in the USSR, it is currently redeployed as part of the Russian state\u2019s repressive apparatus to target political dissidents and further stigmatize and medicalize LGBTIQ persons. Combining discourse analysis and archival research, this project will build on biopolitical theory to establish and explain the role of institutional psychiatry in Putin\u2019s authoritarianism in the context of broader national and global histories of political abuses of psychiatry. The project will contribute to the understanding that Russia\u2019s return to authoritarianism was enabled and assisted, among other things, by a specific legacy and evolution of biopolitical expertise and practices, including those in healthcare. Thus, the project will add indispensable facets to the current interpretations of Putinism and its return to autocracy that are so far predominantly – and insufficiently – focused on political ideologies and identity politics. Further, by identifying what makes psychiatric practices and discourse vulnerable to political abuse in the Russian context, the project will contribute to the effort of envisioning safer infrastructures of mental health care in democratizing states and elsewhere.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","class_list":["post-6057","project","type-project","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n