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      Mental hygiene for geniuses: psychiatry in the early Soviet years.

      Journal of the History of the Neurosciences
      Aptitude, History, 19th Century, History, 20th Century, Humans, Intelligence, Mental Health, history, Psychiatry, USSR

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          Abstract

          In this paper, I deal with one episode from the early history of Soviet psychiatry, the project of the Institute of Genius. Though the project never materialized, the idea was characteristic of the very beginning of the Soviet era, when the wildest experiments in the human sciences seemed possible. The author of the project, the psychiatrist Grigorii Vladimirovich Segalin (1878-1960), followed in the steps of another prominent psychiatrist, the architect of the Soviet mental health care system, Lev Markovich Rozenshtein (1884-1934). Rozenshtein, a proponent of social medicine, introduced a new system of psychiatric help that, by contrast with the prerevolutionary one, was preventive and based on outpatient units - neuropsychiatric dispensaries. In a similar way, Segalin planned dispensaries for geniuses, where these otherwise "socially ill adapted" people would receive professional help and care. Having failed to establish such an institution, he founded a journal, the Clinical Archive of Genius and Talent (of Europathology), where he and his like-minded colleagues discussed the supposed pathological origins of talent and published pathographies of outstanding figures. The article traces Segalin's project till its end in the early 1930s.

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          Author and article information

          Journal
          17365560
          10.1080/09647040600550343

          Chemistry
          Aptitude,History, 19th Century,History, 20th Century,Humans,Intelligence,Mental Health,history,Psychiatry,USSR

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