On Dissidents and Madness: From the Soviet Union of Leonid Brezhnev to the Soviet Union of Vladimir Putin Tapa dura - 2009

Robert van Voren (1959) became active as a human rights activist in 1977. In 1980 he co-founded the Global Initiative on Psychiatry-GIP (then called the International Association on the Political Use of Psychiatry) of which he is currently Chief Executive. GIP successfully campaigned to have the Soviets removed from the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) in 1983. In 1990-1991 GIP started to assist reform minded psychiatrists in the (former) USSR to humanize mental health care. Since then the organization has become active in forty countries in Central & Eastern Europe, the former USSR, Africa and South-East Asia. Robert van Voren was elected Honorary Fellow of the British Royal College of Psychiatrists in 1997, Honorary Member of the Ukrainian Psychiatric Association in 2004 and was knighted in 2005 for his work as a human rights activist. In 2003 he was granted Lithuanian citizenship.