P0144 - Qualification of danger on the part of patients with mental disorders in Russia

Abstract

Fifteen year experience in courts on civil and criminal cases as experts and specialists allows speaking of regular campaign of rudely loose interpretation of danger on the part of persons with mental disorders.

In 1992 Law on Psychiatric Care stipulated three generally accepted type of danger. Dominating in Russia supporters of police psychiatry at first tried to equal their importance, later on tried three times to remove from the notion “direct danger” definition “direct”, and since 2006 they have begun to interpret “direct danger” without taking into account this definition. Qualification of danger in forensic-psychiatric practice has begun to wider beyond the limits of own psychiatric criteria in the direction of risk of repetition of actions and deeds, which in their turn have been loosely in a rude way interpreted in legal practice as criminal ones. In the most evident way it was manifested since introduction into legislation in 2006 the notion “prophylactics of terrorism” as it was in old times in the article “for slander on Soviet power”. Several concrete examples show that in order to avoid mistakes it is necessary to understand “social danger” only in the framework of own professional competence, i.e. only in “clinic-psychopathological sense” by which “social danger” is not limited and to which it is not equal. “Degrees of potential danger considering an accomplished deed”, which on well ground are not measures by clinic-psychological evaluation overstep the limits of professional competence of the psychiatrist and their qualification is illegitimate for him.