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Alexander Voloshanovich (Russian: Александр Волошанович) is a Russian psychiatrist who collaborated with the Working Commission to Investigate the Use of Psychiatry for Political Purposes affiliated with the Moscow Helsinki Group.

Alexander Voloshanovich was born in Kharkov in 1941. When he was 16, he left school, having made a decision to work and to finish his secondary education at night school. He worked in factories and as a coal miner in the Donbass region for five years. In 1968, he graduated from the Kharkov Medical Institute which he joined in 1962.

He become a member of the All-Union Society of Neurologists and Psychiatrists and worked as a psychiatrist in the Moscow region until his resignation in 1979.

An experience with one case gave him an awareness of the possibility that psychiatry was being abused. As a result, in 1977 he began to collaborate with the Working Commission to Investigate the Use of Psychiatry for Political Purposes where his key task was to examine persons who had been confined to psychiatric hospitals for political reasons, or had reason to fear that they would be so confined. He gave the Working Commission his reports with instructions that copies were to be delivered in confidence only to those legal, psychiatric and human rights groups or persons who were concerned with the defense of dissidents from psychiatric persecution. Almost all the reports he gave were sent to the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

After the Commission member Alexander Podrabinek was tried in August 1978, Voloshanovich gave western journalists a press conference and told them that in none of the 27 cases he had by then examined he had found any justification for compulsory treatment or detention in psychiatric hospitals, even admitting possible differences in the criteria for mental disorder. He came to the same conclusion in all the 40 cases examined by him.

On 7 February 1980, Voloshanovich emigrated from the Soviet Union.[1]

References

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  1. ^ "Dr Alexander Voloshanovich: A Critic of the Political Misuse of Psychiatry in the USSR" (PDF). Psychiatric Bulletin. 4 (5): 70–71. 1980. doi:10.1192/pb.4.5.70.
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