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Research register
Argentina: psychiatric labels inside political prisons
Rafael and Melo's Locura y suicidio en las cárceles de la dictadura describes prison psychiatry recast as a control instrument: prisoners classified as "inestables", "peligrosos", "paranoicos" or "desequilibrados", which opened the door to isolation and medication…
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What the record says
Worldwide register by region (Batch 2) · Batch 5
- Country / period
- Argentina, 1976–1983
- Mechanism
- Psychiatric labeling of legalized political prisoners inside penitentiaries; dismantling of the Federación Argentina de Psiquiatras; disappearance of mental-health professionals
- What is documented
- Rafael and Melo's Locura y suicidio en las cárceles de la dictadura describes prison psychiatry recast as a control instrument: prisoners classified as "inestables", "peligrosos", "paranoicos" or "desequilibrados", which opened the door to isolation and medication, alongside induced despair the authors read as engineered suicide; the junta suppressed community psychiatry it considered leftist while adapting its techniques to promote "Western and Christian" values
- Finding or status
- Scholarly review (UNPAZ, Debates sobre Derechos Humanos, Spanish); La Marea on Ramos's research (Spanish)
- Contrary evidence / limits
- CONADEP (1984) documents disappearances, not psychiatric commitment; psychiatric labeling was ancillary to imprisonment
- Label
- SUPPORTED (local-language)
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Linked corrections
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Reference and provenance
1976-AR-PRISON-PSYCHIATRY