The Soviet system used psychiatry as a weapon by diagnosing political opponents as mentally ill in order to confine them as patients instead of trying them in court. Anyone who challenged the state such as dissidents, writers, would-be emigrants, religious believers, or human rights activists could be branded with fabricated disorders like sluggish schizophrenia. This turned normal political disagreement into supposed medical pathology and allowed the state to present dissent as insanity.
Once labeled in this way, people were placed in psychiatric hospitals where they could be held for long periods without legal protections. Harsh treatments were often used to break their resolve. The collaboration between state security organs and compliant psychiatrists created a system where political imprisonment was disguised as medical care, letting the Soviet regime suppress opposition while pretending it was addressing illness rather than silencing critics.
You seem to have misinterpreted my point.
It’s not about people being uninterested in politics, it’s about most people losing the ability to even see politics as something else than some topic you could be interested in or not. To feel like they might be able to have any kind of meaningful effect on their environment. And it’s not about mental illness being criminalized it’s about mental illness being used (conscientiously or not) as a tool to fight against dissent.
And why would it be ridiculous? Culturally enforced and internalized rules are way stronger than the ones enforced by coercion. I agree that it’s worse on a personal level to risk being arrested for a thought crime and institutionalized or sent into some camp as a result of it. But as a society it’s less effective and pernicious than the collective apathy and political impotence we’re swimming in.
Under the Soviet union people saw or knew other disappeared. They knew something was happening and that they’d better shut up about it. When you were caught as an enemy of the state or of the ideology, you at least had a clear indication of what outside force is at work against you. Psychologically it’s very different.
Nowadays apart for the few percents that are actually politically active (and even some if not most of those are not spared on the inside), people feel that it’s their fault if they don’t fit in, they feel or are told by the ambient noise that they have to fix themselves, that the problem is them. That there is a disconnect from reality, from the world. The classical “what is wrong?”. And to be happy, to fix that, all they have is to consume, focus on themselves, find themselves, improve, or just look like they’re doing that. Like rats taking electrical discharge after discharge with no way to get out or even understand what’s causing it in sight.