[Awareness of the political abuse of psychiatry in relation to psychiatry and the law].

The political abuse of psychiatry in the former USSR was enabled by: 1. a disproportionate pointing up of the medical criteria of mental disorder to the detriment of the social ones, above all by circumventing the sociological labelling process; 2. lack of control of involuntary psychiatric hospitalisation by the law; 3. an obsolete definition of psychiatry. The author suggests a definition of psychiatry taking into consideration both the above mentioned criteria and making the importance of the legal control of involuntary psychiatric hospitalisation more evident.