April 20, 2004

Reich to Receive 2004 APA Human Rights Award

Walter Reich, Yitzhak Rabin Memorial Professor of International Affairs, Ethics and Human Behavior, ESIA, and professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, CCAS, will receive the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) 2004 Human Rights Award. The award will be conferred at the annual meeting of the APA in New York May 3.

Reich has devoted much of his professional and personal life to the protection of human rights around the world. During the ’70s and ’80s, along with colleagues in the APA, Reich spearheaded the organization’s successful international efforts to condemn the Soviet abuse of psychiatry to suppress political dissent. At the same time, he undertook a systematic study of Soviet psychiatry and of its diagnostic theories — especially regarding schizophrenia — that formed the basis for the misdiagnoses of dissidents. In so doing, Reich demonstrated the vulnerability of psychiatric diagnosis everywhere to distortion and political abuse.

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