to the queries of law enforcement and judicial authorities by solving the issues of involuntary hospitalization, sanity, etc. In Russia, all that goes by opposites. The psychiatrist is vested with punitive functions, is involved in involuntary hospitalization, the state machine hides behind his back, actually manipulating the doctor. The police are reluctant to investigate offences committed by the mentally ill. After receiving the information about their disease, the bodies of inquiry very often stop the investigation and do not bring it to the level of investigative actions. Thereby psychiatry becomes a cloak for the course of justice and, by doing so, serves as a source for the rightlessness and stigmatization of both psychiatrists and persons with mental disorders. The negative attitude to psychiatrists is thereby supported by the state machine and is accompanied by the aggression against the doctors, which increases during the periods of social unrest. Vladimir Bukovsky, well known for his struggle against political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union, explained that using psychiatry against dissidents was usable to the KGB because hospitalization did not have an end date, and, as a result, there were cases when dissidents were kept in psychiatric prison hospitals for 10 or even 15 years. "Once they pump you with drugs, they can forget about you", he said and added, "I saw people who basically were asleep for years." US President Ronald Reagan attributed the view that the "brutal treatment of Soviet dissidents was due to bureaucratic inertia." Residual problems In the opinion of the Moscow Helsinki Group chairwoman Lyudmila Alexeyeva, the attribution of a mental illness to a prominent figure who came out with a political declaration or action is the most significant factor in the assessment of psychiatry during the 1960–1980s. The practice of forced confinement of political dissidents in psychiatric facilities in the former USSR and Eastern Europe destroyed the credibility of psychiatric practice in these countries. When the psychiatric profession is discredited in one part of the world, psychiatry is discredited throughout the world. Psychiatry lost its professional basis entirely when it was abused to stifle dissidence in the former USSR and in the euthanasia program in Nazi Germany. There is little doubt that the capacity for using psychiatry to enforce social norms and even political interests is immense. Now psychiatry is vulnerable because many of its notions have been questioned, and the sustainable pattern of mental life,