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Larisa Arap has just emerged from a 46-day imprisonment in two Russian psychiatric hospitals. Pills were forced down her throat and she received injection after injection. She doesn't know what medications they were, or whether they will cause permanent damage.
"I don't feel very well, but I have a fighting spirit," Arap said yesterday, adding that sometimes she was so drugged she could barely walk or speak.
She was forcibly interned, not for health reasons, but over her association with the opposition group led by former chess star Garry Kasparov, the United Civil Front. Her arrest stemmed from the publication of an article entitled "Madhouse", exposing the ghoulish practices of Russian psychiatric hospitals in the Murmansk edition of his organisation's newspaper, Dissenters' March.
Arap, 48, was interned in the very hospitals she had written about. "We're ready to take this to court, although the medics have made it clear to us that we'll lose," she said.
Russian activists say her ordeal confirms what they've argued for years: punitive psychiatry did not end with the Soviet Union. Now, critics suggest, if someone has a grudge - a husband, a business partner, even a psychiatrist - it isn't difficult to get them confined to a padded room.
In recent years, Arap had been looking after the child of her daughter, Taisiya, in her home town of Murmansk, north of the Arctic Circle. Problems first arose in 2003, when she uncovered corruption in her local housing association, she reported in "Madhouse". She was then attacked in the entrance of her building, mystery callers threatened to murder her, and finally was warned by the FSB, the KGB's successor, to keep quiet. She didn't.
Taken to a mental ward, Arap noted that many of its occupants seemed perfectly sane.
"I was surprised that among them were lots of normal people," she wrote in "Madhouse".
"But how they [staff] communicated with them: They shouted, they beat them up, they put them on drips, after which people became like zombies, they raped them, they carried them off in the night to who knows where and returned them to the infirmary in the morning, tormented."
One woman was threatened with the removal of organs, Arap said. Children were told that if they didn't give massages to medics, they'd receive electroshock therapy.
Arap was freed, but on July 5, she was restrained at a clinic after stopping by to pick up documentation needed to obtain a driver's licence. Her doctor asked if she had written the article "Madhouse", and when she confirmed, police escorted her to a Murmansk mental hospital.
Taisiya said that when she was first arrested, Arap was beaten, and went on a five-day hunger strike in protest at her incarceration, consuming nothing but water and smoking cigarettes.
It was only on July 18 that a court sanctioned her hospitalisation; until then, she had been detained illegally. Arap was moved to a hospital near Apatity, 180 miles from Murmansk, "without her agreement or the agreement of her relatives", Taisiya said.
It was "a closed hospital from which people rarely return ... No positive feelings arise in this hospital. It's a psychological hospital for the difficult, the dangerous, the abandoned."
Mrs Arap was eventually released by a commission initiated by Russia's human rights ombudsman, Vladimir Lukin.
She is due in court today to protest her treatment, and the United Civil Front plans to prosecute every individual they say is involved, although a representative admitted the group has little chance of winning.
- Independent
