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<p>This article examines the political abuse of psychiatry in Romania during the Ceaușescu era (1965–1989), analyzing how psychiatric institutions were systematically transformed into instruments of ideological control. Drawing on <i>Securitate</i> archives, victim testimonies, legal documents, and medical reports, this study demonstrates three interconnected dimensions of psychiatric repression: the operational mechanics through which political dissent was pathologized into psychiatric diagnosis; the deployment of medical authority to disguise political persecution as therapeutic intervention; and Romania’s distinctive post-1989 failure of accountability, through which perpetrator structures survived regime change intact. The analysis reveals how complicit psychiatrists wielded diagnostic categories such as “paranoia” and “discordant syndrome” as political code, while institutions inflicted systematic violence masked as treatment. Unlike other post-communist transitions where lustration laws dismantled collaborator networks, Romania’s psychiatric <i>nomenclatura</i> maintained uninterrupted control over professional structures, investigative commissions, and institutional memory. This article contributes to scholarship on medical ethics, state violence, and the <i>weaponization</i> of health care under authoritarian regimes, integrating operational, institutional, and transitional justice perspectives. In doing so, it demonstrates how the fusion of medical authority with security power produced a form of repression uniquely resistant to external scrutiny and post-communist accountability.</p>

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Psychiatric Violence as Communist Statecraft: Political Medicine and Failed Accountability in Romania

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年7月25日

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  • Cringuta Irina Pelea

摘要

This article examines the political abuse of psychiatry in Romania during the Ceaușescu era (1965–1989), analyzing how psychiatric institutions were systematically transformed into instruments of ideological control. Drawing on Securitate archives, victim testimonies, legal documents, and medical reports, this study demonstrates three interconnected dimensions of psychiatric repression: the operational mechanics through which political dissent was pathologized into psychiatric diagnosis; the deployment of medical authority to disguise political persecution as therapeutic intervention; and Romania’s distinctive post-1989 failure of accountability, through which perpetrator structures survived regime change intact. The analysis reveals how complicit psychiatrists wielded diagnostic categories such as “paranoia” and “discordant syndrome” as political code, while institutions inflicted systematic violence masked as treatment. Unlike other post-communist transitions where lustration laws dismantled collaborator networks, Romania’s psychiatric nomenclatura maintained uninterrupted control over professional structures, investigative commissions, and institutional memory. This article contributes to scholarship on medical ethics, state violence, and the weaponization of health care under authoritarian regimes, integrating operational, institutional, and transitional justice perspectives. In doing so, it demonstrates how the fusion of medical authority with security power produced a form of repression uniquely resistant to external scrutiny and post-communist accountability.