The Soviet system used psychiatry as a weapon by diagnosing political opponents as mentally ill in order to confine them as patients instead of trying them in court. Anyone who challenged the state such as dissidents, writers, would-be emigrants, religious believers, or human rights activists could be branded with fabricated disorders like sluggish schizophrenia. This turned normal political disagreement into supposed medical pathology and allowed the state to present dissent as insanity.
Once labeled in this way, people were placed in psychiatric hospitals where they could be held for long periods without legal protections. Harsh treatments were often used to break their resolve. The collaboration between state security organs and compliant psychiatrists created a system where political imprisonment was disguised as medical care, letting the Soviet regime suppress opposition while pretending it was addressing illness rather than silencing critics.
Sure. And because the symptoms of a mental illness can be far more subtle and amorphous than a physical malady, there’s very little you can do to ahem Go Clear as it were. Enter groups, like Scientology and Christianity, that claim they can definitively prove you are Saved from what ails you.
But I’d argue the root of the problem - whether you’re a secularized Soviet-Era communist or a liberal Catholic Capitalist - is whether you’re allowed to show any amount of compassion at an institutional level. The horror of Russian Stalinism (and American Reaganism) is largely in the eugenics-inspired belief that the only cure for illness is executing anyone pronounced unwell. The allure of pseudo-scientific opposition to psychiatry is their promise of a definitive panacea for everything, rather than a long-term treatment plan that requires human labor and patience and genuine empathy just to mitigate the most acute symptoms.