Category: Systems

How to Avoid Becoming an Agent of Social Control: Anatoly Koryagin

Post author By Maria Yang, MD
Post date January 10, 2026

Psychiatrists are always at risk of becoming agents of social control. In most U.S. states, we have the power to force people, under specific conditions, into psychiatric hospitals. (Washington State is one of the few states where psychiatrists cannot do this. We have to call someone else with that authority.)

A Very Important Person in the U.S. government has said, “… we live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” The federal government has manifested this intention in both internal and external affairs.

As a result, I have growing concerns that the U.S. government will use psychiatrists as tools for force. This has happened before. How have psychiatrists in the past resisted these pressures? How can I prepare myself to do the same?

The Lancet published a paper in 1981, “Unwilling Patients“, by Soviet psychiatrist Anatoly Koryagin. Dr. Koryagin (stationed in the then state of Ukraine…) wrote this paper

to analyze the conditions in which healthy people in the U.S.S.R. are pronounced mentally ill and are condemned to exist as such.

Dr. Koryagin describes conditions that encouraged psychiatrists to become extensions of the government:

The government passed laws that recognized “anti-Soviet” speech and activities as crimes.

Law enforcement officials at all levels of government picked up people for violating these laws. They then brought them to psychiatric hospitals for observation or evaluation. If psychiatrists diagnosed them as mentally ill, then compulsory treatment followed.

Some people, brought in by law enforcement, were detained even though no psychiatrist ever evaluated them. This means one of two things happened:

psychiatrists in the community signed detention orders without ever meeting the person, or
hospital psychiatrists automatically signed detention orders when law enforcement arrived.

Psychiatrists shifted clinical definitions.

At that time in the U.S.S.R., the clinical meaning of “socially dangerous” was a person “in danger of committing acts which would endanger his own health or that of people around him.” This is largely consistent with the detention threshold now in the United States.

However, some U.S.S.R. psychiatrists began detaining people because they were “capable of harming the social system as a whole”. This was a judicial interpretation of “socially dangerous”. Thus, for detention to occur, both the referring psychiatrist and accepting hospital psychiatrist substituted the judicial definition for the clinical one.

Even though the only symptoms these patients exhibited were “‘anti-Soviet’ attitudes, expressions, and actions”, most people were diagnosed as “psychopaths (70%) or schizophrenics (30%)”. (A.I. tells me that the DSM-5 equivalent of “psychopath” in the Soviet Union in the late 1970s is antisocial personality disorder.) One Soviet forensic psychiatrist wrote of a patient, “No normal person can be opposed to the Workers’ and Peasants’ State.”

Psychiatrists acquiesced and transformed hospitals into sites of punishment, not treatment.

Once people were hospitalized, “the main aim of these confinements to hospital was the isolation of the patient and not treatment of mental illness”. Gallows humor emerged: The term for this was apparently “wall therapy”.

For those who received medical interventions, they were severe:

“insulin comas”
“intensive course of injections with neuroleptic drugs for a week”

A 16 year-old girl reported that she was “severely beaten by the medical staff” after she tried to escape. She then was “subjected to treatment with neuroleptic drugs”.

Psychiatrists gave up on patient care and abandoned their professional duties.

Dr. Koryagin notes:

Not one of these people has said that the health authorities or, more particularly, the doctors at psychiatric clinics, have helped them in any way whatsoever.

Given the context, these were not disgruntled patients. Doctors almost always have more power than patients. It is easier to identify abuses of power, like when doctors inflict harm on their patients.

However, not using the power one has is also a misuse of power. Pressure and coercion from the government are always overwhelming. To yield to that pressure creates a vacuum that those who covet strength, force, and power race to fill.

The psychiatrists Dr. Koryagin describes abandoned their power and authority as physicians. Their “patients” suffered the consequences. Thus, Dr. Koryagin reminds us (emphasis mine):

A doctor is obliged to take an active interest in all the patients on his list, so that he may help them in legal and social, as well as medical matters.

In my view this guidance applies not only to the patients who are under our care now, but also to those who were and those who will be. This is why it is vital to advocate for the health and well-being of all. Even—and especially—if the government thinks some people are undeserving.

Homelessness Policy Public health psychiatry Systems

Loud Music Is Disorder. What About Memecoins?

Post author By Maria Yang, MD
Post date June 22, 2025

I read this provocative essay about “disorder” when it was first published in September 2024. I found myself alternating between nodding and frowning. It’s not a short essay, but I do encourage you to read it. (For those who lean left politically, the author is a thoughtful conservative commentator named Charles Fain Lehman, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.) I considered writing up my reactions at the time, but I deferred. My reactions felt squishy. I didn’t have data to back up my reasons for frowning.

I still don’t have data, but the increasing disorder at the federal level frustrates me.

To summarize: Lehman opens by citing statistics that crime has indeed fallen in the US. Many Americans, though, feel that crime is rising both in their communities and across the nation. He then argues that “disorder” is increasing and offers these as examples of “disorder”:

A man blasting loud music from his phone in a subway car;

Teenagers spray-painting graffiti on a public park;

A large homeless encampment taking over a city block;

A man throwing his trash on the ground and walking away;

A group of women selling sex on a street corner.

From this, he proposes a definition for “disorder”: domination of public space for private purposes.

He goes on to argue that engaging in disorderly behavior is the rational choice, but most people do not contribute to disorder. Why? He attributes this to

“social control”—the regulation of individual behavior by social institutions through informal and formal means.

Lehman says that the Covid pandemic, in particular, weakened social control (e.g., fewer “eyes on the street” due to increasing remote work; reduction of law enforcement numbers due to the George Floyd murder and defund the police efforts). He adds that “the core to combating disorder is restoring public control of public space.”

To his credit, he doesn’t offer law enforcement as the sole solution. Lehman briefly describes changing the environment with intention (e.g., broadcasting deterrent music, putting pressure on landlords to clean up spaces). But, once informal efforts fail to restore order, then formal systems must intervene. In his view, law enforcement is the primary formal system.

Most of my professional work has been with people experiencing homelessness and mental illness. But I’m not actually cool with people living outside. I feel discouraged and unsettled when I see tents blocking lengths of sidewalks. When I see people slumped on the sidewalk due to fentanyl, my first thought is, “I wish you would stop using drugs.” I am not a fan of disorder.[1]

I like Lehman’s definition of disorder. While not comprehensive, “domination of public space for private purposes” is a reasonable starting point.

What I don’t like is how many of his examples are associated with poverty (homeless encampment; prostitution; loud music on public transit, a space rarely used by wealthy people). Yes, these are visible and common examples of disorder. But what about the disorder associated with people with wealth and power? Just because we don’t see it every day doesn’t mean people with money and influence are paragons of morality. Why no commentary on that?

Is it disorder when the President visits golf resorts that he owns? He profits from his Secret Service detail staying in his hotels. Isn’t that the domination of public funds (our tax dollars!) for his private, profit-building purposes?

Likewise, is it disorder when the President and his wife launch their own memecoins? Isn’t their use of public office to collect millions of dollars a form of disorder?

Is it disorder when the deputy chief of staff in the White House redirects ICE agents to enact his own anti-immigration agenda?

Is it disorder when the federal administration cuts millions of dollars from scientific research funding because language in the grants references race, gender, and sex? Isn’t this the domination of public resources for a private, anti-DEI ideology?

Is it disorder when the federal administration wants to cut billions in Medicaid funding so that people with extraordinary wealth will get tax breaks? How is that not domination of public resources for private purposes?

None of these actions had occurred by September 2024. Regardless, I wonder if Lehman had considered the intersection of power with his definition of disorder. Lehman says early on in his essay that

critics [contend] that disorder is just another word that the powerful use for whatever it is the non-white, poor, and otherwise marginalized do.

This criticism, combined with Lehman’s omission of power, illustrates who does and does not get to define “disorder”.

We are seeing nauseating abuses of power in this Presidential administration. If blasting music on a bus is disorder, but funneling public money into personal projects is not, then we’re not defining disorder. We’re excusing power.

[1] I am a fan in believing that people can change. And they do! People stop drinking and using drugs. They start taking medication, and they learn how to manage their symptoms sooner. Again, just because we don’t see that change every day doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.

Policy Systems

The Word “Mental” in Project 2025. (ix + x + xi)

Post author By Maria Yang, MD
Post date December 14, 2024

The ninth, tenth, and eleventh instances of the word “mental” in Project 2025 are on page 875 in the section about the Federal Trade Commission:

Protecting Children Online. The FTC has long protected children in a variety of different contexts. Internet platforms profit from obtaining information from children without parents’ knowledge or consent—and social media’s effect on the well-being of American children is well-documented. Around 2012, American teens experienced a dramatic decline in wellness. Depression, self-harm, suicide attempts, and suicide all increased sharply among U.S. adolescents between 2011 and 2019, with similar trends worldwide. The increase occurred at the same time that social media use moved from rare to ubiquitous among teens, making social media a prime suspect for the sudden rise in mental health issues among teens. In addition, excessive social media use is strongly linked to mental health issues among individuals. Several studies strongly support the notion that social media use is a cause, not just a correlation, of subjective well-being and poor mental health.

This harkens back to the second time the word “mental” appears in the text, where the authors accuse Big Tech of engineering social media for industrial-scale child abuse. The punchline is, yes, the authors of Project 2025 have legitimate and evidence-based concerns about the adverse effects of social media on kids. I appreciate that this section here at least includes people of all ages (i.e., parents) in asserting that “excessive social media use is strongly linked to mental health issues among individuals”.

After this brief foray into children’s mental health, the text veers back towards its point: Trade and contracts.

Targeting children to create potentially harmful contracts or making parents responsible for such contractual relationships is an unfair trade practice.

… leading to this recommendation:

The FTC should examine platforms’ advertising and contract-making with children as a deceptive or unfair trade practice, perhaps requiring written parental consent.

While a perspective of interdependency views everything as being related to everything else, bringing up the mental health of children within the context of the Federal Trade Commission is curious. As we will see in the next instance of the word “mental” in this document (we’re nearing the end — “mental” only shows up 16 times), there’s ambivalence in this chapter about the role of the FTC. Children’s mental health is used chiefly as a potential subject of regulation. Who is better poised to regulate social media and its effects on children? The government? Or parents? Surprisingly, this seems open to debate in this section. (This entire chapter on the FTC uses notably less inflammatory language, too.)

It is clear, just from reviewing the appearance of the word “mental” in this text, that the authors of Project 2025 have opinions about who should have the power and authority to regulate other people. It is apparent who they believe should (cis male, heterosexual fathers) and who should not (women, children, and everyone else). Because Project 2025 makes multiple references to the authority of Judeo-Christian faith, which worships the Father (dude), the Son (dude), and the Holy Ghost (do spirits have genders?), this is presumably why.

Instead of struggling with how to reconcile the agency that all humans can and could have at this current time and place, the authors of Project 2025 have elected an “all or nothing” approach. This is also reflected in the black-or-white, provocative language used in many portions of this enormous document.

Medicine Policy Systems

The Word “Mental” in Project 2025. (viii)

Post author By Maria Yang, MD
Post date December 7, 2024

The eighth instance of the word “mental” in Project 2025 is on page 648 in the section about the Veterans Health Administration:

Examine the surpluses or deficits in mental health professionals throughout the enterprise, recognizing that the department needs a blend of social workers, therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists with a focus on attracting high-quality talent.

This chapter advocates for “Veteran-centric” care and wants military veterans to have easier access to high quality services. This recommendation is part of a list that calls for bolstering health care personnel to reduce wait times for veterans. This is completely reasonable.

(There are some highly biased comments in this section, such as “the Left’s pernicious trend of abusing the role of government to further its own agenda”, even though the preceding sentence is literally “rescind all departmental clinical policy directives that are contrary to principles of conservative governance”, as if “conservative governance” isn’t an agenda???)

I do wonder how the arbiters will know what numbers of mental health professionals are a “surplus” versus a “deficit”. Most (all?) health systems struggle with a “scarcity” or “substantial shortages” of behavioral health professionals. Perhaps the authors of Project 2025 are aware that mental health professionals, such as psychiatrists, are far more likely to be registered Democrats. The VA directives they want rescinded are ”abortion services and gender reassignment surgery”, so perhaps the “surplus” of mental health professionals are the pernicious Lefties who support those services.

Like most other physicians who trained in the US, I spent time in residency and fellowship working in VA hospitals. (As a medical student I did not train at a VA, but was instead sent to an Air Force base for part of my pediatrics rotation!) We were in the midst of the Iraq War. The VA patients under my care at that time were around my age. (How did fate send us on such different paths, only to intersect in the hospital?) The psychological wounds of these young men from fighting in the war were still gaping. I also saw Vietnam War- and World War II-era patients whose memories were deteriorating, their bodies not yet as infirm as their minds.

Apart from one unfortunate experience, I found my work experiences at the VA meaningful. I know it sounds corny, but it truly is a privilege to provide care to people who have served in the military. (We’ll put aside for now the vexing reality that trainees spend so much time learning their health care profession on patients who don’t have much money in publicly-funded institutions. Never did I nor a colleague treat an Admiral, Commander, or other high-ranking, presumably not poor, officer.) While not routine, I continue to encounter veterans now who are homeless and have significant psychiatric conditions. My primary goal in those instances is to get them connected to the local VA if possible, since the VA, for all of its bureaucratic problems, often offers many more resources than other public programs.

When I consider the provision of mental health services at the VA, I can’t help but think that the best way that we can protect the mental health of veterans is to limit their exposure to war. We can’t prevent all bad things from happening, but war is an especially bad thing. It messes people up. I’m not even talking about formal psychiatric disorders. War induces heartache. I think about the various veterans I’ve worked with as colleagues (some as health care professionals, most not), and what stands out to me is how much loss they carry. They’re “fine”: They are married, they have kids, they have fun hobbies, they do satisfactory to exemplary work at their jobs, some have even achieved high status in their professions.

And then I see artifacts from a comrade who died, sense their guardedness, hear their reluctance to speak about their time in service.

There are things that civilians may never understand. Here I agree that veterans deserve high quality health care. The issue is that the authors of Project 2025 apparently believe that some people do not deserve certain kinds of health care, high quality or not.

Homelessness Policy Public health psychiatry Systems

Homelessness and the Supreme Court.

Post author By Maria Yang, MD
Post date April 21, 2024

Tomorrow (April 22) the United States Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the case City of Grants Pass, Oregon, v. Gloria Johnson. This article, 5 things to know about the Grants Pass homelessness case before the US Supreme Court, summarizes the issue well: “The repercussions could have national implications for how cities can regulate homelessness.” In short, if the Supreme Court sides with the City of Grants Pass, it could essentially be a crime to be homeless. (Note: “Homelessness” here refers strictly to street homelessness. The federal definition includes other populations that are not as visible, such as people living in shelters, people about to be evicted, etc.)

This brings to mind other information:

California Statewide Study of People Experiencing Homelessness. This came out in June of 2023. It’s one of the few recent surveys that examines mental health conditions and substance use among people experiencing homelessness. Over 3,000 people in various parts of California answered surveys and over 300 people participated in detailed interviews. They didn’t administer technical interviews to determine whether people met diagnostic criteria for psychiatric conditions. They instead asked people if they had ever experienced certain symptoms (e.g., hallucinations, anxiety, depression) or engaged in certain behaviors (e.g., used any substance three or more times a week) in the past or at the time of the interview. More than half of the people who responded said that they either had a mental health condition in the past or were experiencing one now. More than half reported that they had used substances in the past; about one-third reported that they were currently using any substance at least three times a week. (Note that “substance” here does not include alcohol or tobacco.)

JAMA Psychiatry: Prevalence of Mental Health Disorders Among Individuals Experiencing Homelessness. I have yet to read this paper. It’s a review and analysis of past research related to this topic (a research study of past research studies, if you will). It looks like they looked at specific diagnoses, with a call out of 44% of people experiencing homelessness experiencing any substance use disorder. Other highlights included in the abstract include prevalence rates for antisocial personality disorder (26%) (one of my most popular posts—from 2013!—is about this condition, for whatever reason… and I’ve been wondering about this one again), major depression (19%), schizophrenia (7%), and bipolar disorder (8%).

Open drug scenes: responses of five European cities. This paper is from 2014, though it holds lessons that we in the US can and should learn from. The information within disappoints everyone, which means it is probably a reasonable map to use.

Open drug scenes are gatherings of drug users who publicly consume and deal drugs.

To be clear, as evidenced by data shared above and from anecdotes from those of us who do this work, not everyone who is homeless uses drugs. Not everyone who uses drugs is homeless, either. Much of the current discourse about homelessness is related to drug use, though, which is why I bring up this paper.

The five cities described in the paper vary in size (Zurich, Switzerland, at around 415,000 people to Lisbon, Portugal, at 2.7 million people), though they each use similar strategies to reduce and eliminate open drug scenes:

drug dependence is a health problem
drug use behavior is a public nuisance problem
need for low threshold health services, outreach social work, and effective policing
appropriate combinations of harm reduction and restrictive measures

Law enforcement is needed to address the public nuisance problem. Robust health and social services that include harm reduction are needed to address the health problem. (At least two of the cities legalized heroin so people can use drugs safely in monitored settings, with hopes that they will one day use less and perhaps stop. Recall that this paper came out before the destructive wave of fentanyl overcame us.) Most cities have yet to find the “appropriate combinations” to reduce open drug scenes. (Just to reiterate, these strategies did not eliminate homelessness, only open drug scenes.)

Textbook Talk: Dr. Van Yu on Housing First and the Role of Psychiatry in Supported Housing. One significant way to eliminate homelessness is to ensure that people have places to live. Lemme tell ya: It is hard to effectively treat someone’s mental health or substance use disorder if they don’t have a stable place to live. If the person can’t or won’t come to you, that means you have to go to them. If you can’t find them (because they don’t have a place to live so they move around a lot), it’s hard to make a connection to help them. Even if they want to participate in treatment, it’s challenging to Do All the Things when you don’t know where you are going to sleep. Can you imagine what you’d do or how you’d feel if you didn’t know where you were going to sleep tonight? Seeing a health care professional likely won’t be your priority. Working in a Housing First or other public setting also changes the way you think about health care: Your interventions don’t just affect one person; they affect a whole community. Conversely, the community influences your interventions as a health care professional. We naturally become systems thinkers. (Full disclosure: Dr. Yu was once my boss. I learned and continue to learn a lot from him.)

I will follow the City of Grants Pass, Oregon, v. Gloria Johnson case with interest. The problem of homelessness is complex because people experiencing homelessness each have distinct challenges. They are not a monolith. I believe that there are government officials who are sympathetic to their circumstances. I still wonder, though, what problem are they trying to solve? Is it that they don’t want people to live outside? Or that they don’t want to see people living outside?