“Larisa Arap must be discharged from hospital”

The members of the expert group conclude that regional healthcare authorities had no right to hospitalise Mrs. Arap against her will. The journalist and human right activist was 5 July forcefully hospitalized during a visit to a hospital in Severomorsk and then subsequently transferred to a psychiatric clinic in Apatity south of Murmansk city.

Head of the Independent Psychiatric Association, Yuri Savenko, says the expert group has met with Larisa Arap and become convinced of her illness, but that the hospital still had no right to force her into hospitalization. Such hospitalization can only be made when the patient is considered a danger to his or her surroundings, which is not the case with Mrs. Arap, Mr. Savenko says.

He adds that certain “non-medical considerations” seem to have played a role in the case, thus indicating that the Kremlin-critical Mrs. Arap might have been a victim of socalled “punitive psychiatry”, a method used extensively by Soviet authorities against opposition groups.

-We are now witnessing that psychiatry again is extending repressive functions, Head of the Independent Psychiatric Association in Russia, Lyubov Vinogradova, says.