Andrei Snezhnevsky coined the term sluggish schizophrenia, an embodier of history of repressive psychiatry, and a direct participant in psychiatric repression against dissidents.
14 Facts About Andrei Snezhnevsky
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Andrei Snezhnevsky was an academician of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences, the director of the Serbsky Institute for Forensic Psychiatry, the director of the Institute of Psychiatry of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences, and the director of the All-Union Mental Health Research Center of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences.
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At the height of his power, Snezhnevsky dominated the whole of Soviet psychiatry.
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Andrei Snezhnevsky forced the psychiatric community in the USSR and in many of its Eastern European satellites to adopt the diagnosis of sluggish schizophrenia as dogma.
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Andrei Snezhnevsky was long attacked in the West as an exemplar of political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union.
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Andrei Snezhnevsky was charged with cynically developing a system of diagnosis which could be bent for political purposes and, in dozens of cases, he personally signed a commission decision on legal insanity of mentally healthy dissidents including Vladimir Bukovsky, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Leonid Plyushch, Mikola Plakhotnyuk, Petro Grigorenko.
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In 2011, Tiganov said it was rumored that Andrei Snezhnevsky took pity on dissenters and gave them a diagnosis required for placing in a special hospital to save them from a prison, but it was not true, he honestly did his medical duty.
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The evidence is sufficient to conclude that Professor Andrei Snezhnevsky has acted unethically and no longer warrants a place of honour in the Royal College of Psychiatrists.
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In 1968, Andrei Snezhnevsky wrote of a distinction between the positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia, a concept long attributed to Snezhnevky but in fact introduced by John Hughlings Jackson and John Russell Reynolds.
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Andrei Snezhnevsky worked together with Smulevich every day for 20 years.
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St Petersburg academic psychiatrist professor Yuri Nuller notes that the concept of Andrei Snezhnevsky's school allowed psychiatrists to consider, for example, schizoid psychopathy and even schizoid character traits as early, delayed in their development, stages of the inevitable progredient process, rather than as personality traits inherent to the individual, the dynamics of which might depend on various external factors.
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Andrei Snezhnevsky asserted that Snezhnevsky was wrongly condemned by critics and argued that it was time for psychiatry in the Western countries to reconsider the accounts of political abuse of psychiatry in the USSR in the hope of discovering that Soviet psychiatrists were more deserving of sympathy than condemnation.
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Andrei Snezhnevsky was honored with the title of a Hero of Socialist Labour, two Orders of Lenin, four Orders of the Red Banner of Labour, and the USSR State Prize.
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Andrei Snezhnevsky died on 12 July 1987 in Moscow and was buried in the Kuntsevo Cemetery.