Serbsky Institute

The Serbsky State Scientific Center for Social and Forensic Psychiatry is a psychiatric hospital and Russia's main center of forensic psychiatry. In the past, the institution was called the Serbsky Institute . The institution garnered negative publicity because many Soviet dissidents were examined there and then sent to psychiatric hospitals.InstituteThe Institute started in 1921, and was named after Russian psychiatrist Vladimir Serbsky. One of the main stated purposes of the institute was to assist in forensic psychiatry for the criminal courts. Moscow Serbsky Institute conducts more than 2,500 court-ordered evaluations per year.The Institute also claimed leadership in studying different types of psychosis, brain trauma, alcoholism and drug addiction. One celebrity treated for an addiction was Vladimir Vysotsky. The Serbsky Center is now headed by Zurab Kekelidze (ru), the chief psychiatrist of the Ministry of Health and Social Development of the Russian Federation, whose dissertation was on sluggish schizophrenia. Kekelidze is known to believe that homosexuality in some cases is a mental disorder and has not been excluded from the list of mental disorders.