Balsai iš sovietinių psichiatrijos ligoninių: savojo aš sampratos skunduose / ; Voices from Soviet psychiatric hospitals: the perceptions of the self in patients’ complaints.

This article is based on an analysis of Soviet patients’ complaints stored in the archive of Soviet Lithuania’s Ministry of Health Care. The analysis of patients’ complaints aims at interpreting the self-perception of mentally ill persons in Soviet psychiatric hospitals. The complaints are interpreted as a part of public communication that could help us to understand the process of social identification, that is, how a subject represents himself to others and how he defines himself by the social categories. The most significant discourses in the context of Soviet psychiatry are brought out. These discourses had formed the components and sub-components of the perception of the self: the self as a Soviet citizen, as an object of medicine, as a patient, and as mentally ill. The analysis shows how the subjects used the vocabulary of a particular discourse, and in the situations of the conflicts did not reject a discourse but were searching for a way to rationalize their experience. At the same time it is important to emphasize the expectations which these discourses form. These expectations, if not fulfilled, generated the dissatisfaction by which it became possible to recognize the subject as a self defining her/himself, reflecting her/his situation, and seeking to change it. In this way probably for the first time in the history of modern Lithuania it became possible to hear the voices of the patients of psychiatric hospitals who defended their own subjectivity, although they found themselves in the captivity of so-called truth regimes.