dangerous than not diagnosing mental illness. German psychiatrist Hanfried Helmchen says the uncertainty of diagnosis is prone to other than medical influence, e.g., political influence, as was the case with Soviet dissenters who were stifled by a psychiatric diagnosis, especially that of "sluggish schizophrenia," in order to take them away from society in special psychiatric hospitals. According to Russian psychologist Dmitry Leontev, punitive psychiatry in the Soviet Union was based on the assumption that only a madman can go against public dogma and seek for truth and justice. K. Fulford, A. Smirnov, and E. Snow state: "An important vulnerability factor, therefore, for the abuse of psychiatry, is the subjective nature of the observations on which psychiatric diagnosis currently depends." The concerns about political abuse of psychiatry as a tactic of controlling dissent have been regularly voiced by American psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, and he mentioned that these authors, who correctly emphasized the value-laden nature of psychiatric diagnoses and the subjective character of psychiatric classifications, failed to accept the role of psychiatric power. Musicologists, drama critics, art historians, and many other scholars also create their own subjective classifications; however, lacking state-legitimated power over persons, their classifications do not lead to anyone's being deprived of property, liberty, or life. For instance, plastic surgeon's classification of beauty is subjective, but the plastic surgeon cannot treat his or her patient without the patient's consent, therefore, there cannot be any political abuse of plastic surgery. The bedrock of political medicine is coercion masquerading as medical treatment. What transforms coercion into therapy are physicians diagnosing the person's condition an "illness," declaring the intervention they impose on the victim a "treatment," and legislators and judges legitimating these categorizations as "illnesses" and "treatments." In the same way, physician-eugenicists advocated killing certain disabled or ill persons as a form of treatment for both society and patient long before the Nazis came to power. Szasz argued that the spectacle of the Western psychiatrists loudly condemning Soviet colleagues for their abuse of professional standards was largely an exercise in hypocrisy. Psychiatric abuse, such as people usually associated with practices in the former USSR, was connected not with the misuse of psychiatric diagnoses, but with the political power built into the social role of the psychiatrist in democratic and totalitarian societies alike. Psychiatrically and legally fit subjects for involuntary mental hospitalization had always been "dissidents." It is the contents and contours of dissent