Sluggishly progressing schizophrenia was a category of schizophrenia diagnosed by psychiatrists in the Soviet Union. At the time, Western psychiatry recognized only four types of schizophrenia: Catatonic, hebephrenic, paranoid, and simple. The diagnostic criteria for this fifth category were so vague that it could be applied to virtually any person not suffering from mental function impairment and having interests beyond survival needs. The diagnosis was often applied to dissidents who were not in fact mentally ill, so that they could be forcibly hospitalized in mental institutions and subjected to treatments including powerful anti-depressants and electroconvulsive therapy. In general, a diagnosis (plural diagnoses) covers a broad spectrum, or spectra, of testing in some form of analysis; such tests based on some collective reasoning is called the method of diagnostics, leading then to the results of those tests by ideal (ethics) would then be considered a diagnosis, but... Psychiatry is a branch of medicine that studies and treats mental and emotional disorders (see mental illness). ... This is a page about catatonic state. ... Schizophrenia is a psychiatric diagnosis denoting a persistent, often chronic, mental illness variously affecting behaviour, thinking, and emotion. ... For other senses of this word, see paranoia (disambiguation). ... A mental illness or mental disorder refers to one of many mental health conditions characterized by distress, impaired cognitive functioning, atypical behavior, Emotional dysregulation, and/or maladaptive behavior. ... A psychiatric hospital (also called at various places and times, mental hospital, mental ward, sanitarium or asylum) is a hospital specializing in the treatment of persons with mental illness. ... A recent form of antidepressant medication - Prozac Serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor, Venlafaxine An antidepressant, in the most common usage, is a medication taken to alleviate clinical depression or dysthymia (milder depression). ... Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), also known as electroshock, is a psychiatric treatment in which seizures are induced by passing electricity through the brain of an anaesthetised patient. ...

The existence of this diagnosis has led to questions on the part of supporters of anti-psychiatry about the existence of schizophrenia in general, about whether it is diagnosed properly, and about political misuses of the schizophrenia diagnosis in the West. Beginning in the 1960s, a movement called anti-psychiatry claimed that psychiatric patients are not ill but are individuals that do not share the same consensus reality as most people in society. ...

Modern psychiatry now does contain a fifth category; undifferentiated schizophrenia. This is similar to sluggishly progressing schizophrenia only in that it serves as a catch-all categorization for any schizophrenic person who does not easily fit into the other forms. It does, however, require psychotic symptoms to be present for a diagnosis.

External links

• Soviet archives, collected by Vladimir Bukovsky.
• And the Wind Returns, 1978 (И возвращается ветер, in Russian)

See also

• Psikhushka
• Drapetomania
• Oppositional Defiance Disorder