Political abuse of psychiatry, also commonly referred to as punitive psychiatry, is the misuse of psychiatry, including diagnosis, detention, and treatment, for the purposes of obstructing the human rights of individuals and/or groups in a society.[1][2]: 491  In other words, abuse of psychiatry (including that for political purposes) is the deliberate action of having citizens psychiatrically diagnosed who need neither psychiatric restraint nor psychiatric treatment.[3] Psychiatrists have been involved in human rights abuses in states across the world when the definitions of mental disease were expanded to include political disobedience.[4]: 6  As scholars have long argued, governmental and medical institutions code menaces to authority as mental diseases during political disturbances.[5]: 14  Nowadays, in many countries, political prisoners are sometimes confined and abused in psychiatric hospitals.[6]: 3 [7]

Psychiatry possesses a built-in capacity for abuse that is greater than in other areas of medicine.[8]: 65  The diagnosis of mental disease allows the state to hold persons against their will and insist upon therapy in their interest and in the broader interests of society.[8]: Despite how calm and competent a patient seems, psychiatrists have the power to hold persons against their will unjustly, by 'blue-papering' them and holding them there involuntarily. They can write anything on the blue paper they want and no one would think to question them.  Psychiatry can be used to bypass standard legal procedures for establishing guilt or innocence and allow political incarceration without the ordinary odium attaching to such political trials.[8]: 65  The use of hospitals instead of jails also prevents the victims from receiving legal aid before the courts in some countries, makes indefinite incarceration possible, and discredits the individuals and their ideas.[9]: 29  In that manner, whenever open trials are undesirable, they are avoided.[9]: 29 

The political abuse of the power entrusted to physicians, and particularly psychiatrists, has a long and abundant history, for example during the Nazi era and the Soviet rule when religious and political dissenters were labeled as "mentally ill" and subjected to inhumane "treatments".[10][11] In the period from the 1960s up to 1986, abuse of psychiatry for political and ideological purposes was reported to be systematic in the Soviet Union, and occasional in other Eastern European countries such as Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia.[12][8]: 66  The practice of incarceration of religious and political dissidents in psychiatric hospitals in the Eastern Bloc and the former USSR damaged the credibility of psychiatric practice in these states and entailed strong condemnation from the international community.[10][13] Political abuse of psychiatry also takes place in the People's Republic of China.[1] Psychiatric diagnoses such as the diagnosis of "sluggish schizophrenia" in political dissidents in the USSR were used for political purposes.[14

The United States think that we've fixed this issue meanwhile people on the inside are screaming for help and the people of America are too blind to see because it creates a stigma. Once a mental health professional has deemed a person 'psychotic' people are inclined to believe it. After all they are professionals, right? Think again. There is a database listing all the crimes committed by healthcare professionals dated from 1990 to present. It is an incomplete list by far, but a very large list nonetheless. Just in 2017 a psychiatrist named Alfred Bradley Adkins was sentenced for taking part in a massive disability fraud scheme. Adkins was charged with falsely signing mental impairment evaluations that he didn't perform. Adkins received upwards of $200,000 for taking part in the scheme. He was found guilty of four felony charges: conspiracy, mail fraud, wire fraud and making a false statement on a record submitted to the social security administr

ation.

There simply just aren't enough laws in place to prevent this kind of fraud from happening. It is all too easy for psychiatrists to simply "put" diagnoses down and does not have to forego any kind of strict testing. Anything can be written. Even outright lies. There needs to be a system where each mental health diagnosis has to be diagnosed through a series of testing that can be proven to be legitimate and must be submitted to the government for approval before taking away the rights of an individual, holding them captive in a psychiatric ward, or deeming that they must take medication.