Word: western
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Reaching beyond the country's borders, Gorbachev has attempted to start joint ventures with foreign investors. The Soviets have proved flexible: the original plan, which insisted on majority Soviet ownership, has been revised to accommodate the demands of Western companies. Last Thursday at a Kremlin ceremony, executives of a consortium of six U.S. firms -- including Chevron, Eastman Kodak and Johnson & Johnson -- signed an agreement for as many as 25 joint ventures involving about $10 billion over the next 20 years. Although the agreement specified ways that profits could be taken out of the Soviet Union in hard currency...
...Soviets have mounted a concerted campaign to regain respectability. While never admitting that Soviet doctors had ever been instruments of political oppression, the Kremlin has released scores of dissidents from mental wards and reformed laws that govern the rights of psychiatric patients. The Soviets have also permitted Western psychiatrists to come to the U.S.S.R. and see for themselves whether mental patients are being mistreated. Those efforts seem to be bearing fruit: last week, the executive committee of the World Psychiatric Association voted to readmit the Soviets, who had withdrawn $ from the organization in 1983 under threat of expulsion. If that...
Soviet psychiatry began to take shape in the 1920s and drew especially on the work of physiologist Ivan Pavlov (whose experiments on conditioning, particularly with dogs, gave the term Pavlovian response to the English language). His followers largely rejected the work of Sigmund Freud and other Western theorists and looked for physical rather than psychological causes of mental problems. That emphasis led Soviet psychiatrists to rely on drug treatment, work therapy and re-education rather than psychotherapy...
...Medical Sciences and who dominated Soviet psychiatry from the early 1950s until his death two years ago. Snezhnevsky considerably broadened the definition of schizophrenia by adding the category "sluggish schizophrenia." He defined the disorder as a slow- developing illness without the hallucinations that are a classic element in the Western definition of many schizophrenias. Instead, the "symptoms" could be nearly all forms of behavior -- unsociability, mild pessimism, stubbornness -- that deviated from the social or political ideal...
Despite their reluctance to comment, the U.S. psychiatrists who traveled to Moscow last month seemed far from reassured by their tour. Some of the visitors said Soviet psychiatrists still appeared to use drugs of dubious medical value. Many Western experts will no doubt oppose readmitting the Soviet Union to the W.P.A. until Moscow shakes up the psychiatric leadership and unequivocally renounces past practices. Though grounds for skepticism remain, there are signs that the current Soviet reform wave will lead to more humane and enlightened forms of psychiatric care...