Psychiatry in Communist Romania, 1950-1980: Between Ideology and Psychopharmacology (presentation)

At the 45th Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) held in Boston, USA on 21-24 November 2013, Corina Doboş presented the paper “Psychiatry in Communist Romania, 1950-1980: Between Ideology and Psychopharmacology”. The presentation deals with the “epistemological” impact the quick postwar political ascension of an interwar fellow traveler of the RCP had on Romanian psychiatry.

It revolved around the social accession pattern of the psychiatrist and endocrinologist C.I. Parhon (1874-1969), a fellow traveler of the CPoR , member of the CPoR since 1944. As director of the newly founded Institute of Endocrinology (since 1946), and head of state of the newly grounded Romanians People Republic (1948-1952), Parhon decisively influenced the epistemological lines of Romanian psychiatry in the first decade of Communist rule in Romania, being actively engaged in the recreation of Psychiatry on ideologically acceptable basis.