"I think that the West is taking excessive care with psychiatric neurosurgery because of the obsession with human rights..." - Svyatoslav Medvedev, director of the Institute of the Human Brain of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Medvedev committed more than 100 lobotomies, mainly to adolescents.
Although my grandmother taught me to count and write before school, I haven't lasted even the first year in school, because as a restless and hyperactive child, accustomed to running alone in the woods around the forest, without any supervision, not having any notions of discipline, respect to authority and behavior in the team, I agitated the whole class, argued with teachers, sometimes leaving the classroom without permission. As the result, I was expelled from school already in the first grade, and at the order government appointed therapist my mother sent me to psychiatrists, so the second year I studied discipline in the psychiatric asylum ("durka" in Russian).
Asylum children were of all conditions and ages, up to 18 years. However, the most prevalent were gopnik children, who were detained for the often serious crime, and sent to the asylum for psychiatric examination. Moreover, older and stronger children loved to beat the weak patients without any repercussions from junior medical staff, which was responsible for the ward's security. I was frequently beaten too. Once a stronger boy punched me into the chest, as a result of my refusal to share with him the tangerines that my mother sent me, although half of the tangerines, as it turned out was stolen by the medical staff. After such punch I was lying for a few minutes trying to regain breath while other children kicked me, because I wasn't the most sociable patient in the ward and was very egoistic, which frowned down by Russians. For the second time, they bent me head down in the toilet bowl as the result of the verbal conflict. The administration ignored such incidents.
However, I got far less mistreatment than the children with enuresis, by-product of whom provided unbearable stench in the ward, and every morning they washed their bed sheets in the toilet, and then during daytime sleep were forced to sleep on the wet sheet. Those, who unconvincingly imitated a sleeping, were punished by medical personnel, which first forcibly tied child to the bed to immobilize, and then drugged by anti-psychotics, other less harmful was of punishment was detainment in a cold small solitary confinement room, without anything to sit on. Enuresis patients were beaten mercilessly by other kids and medical personnel, they wetted themselves in the process, which only encouraged further punishment. One subtile boy was nicknamed "cockerel" (a passive homosexual in prison) and then bullied especially actively, under the condescending eyes of the junior medical staff.
Psychiatric hospital turned out to be the school of life and gave the unforgettable rich experience of living in a government institution. I did not comply with the orders of medical staff, refused to take pills, did not sleep on schedule, and as a result was under some anti-psychotics and sleeping pills all the time. In the end of my in-patient career psychiatrists diagnosed me "Pathological Character Traits" - the standard entry when a psychiatrist needs to diagnose something, but there's nothing to diagnose. The mother referred to the birth-time trauma, saying that I was dropped on the head in the hospital. That birth trauma, my mother reproached me at every opportunity, so when I became interested in programming much later, my mother said that it is rocket science and requires higher mathematics, I'm a disabled child, who was unable to complete the first year in ordinary school. Yet I'am clearly a childhood cripple - at birth I was actually diagnosed with post-traumatic encephalopathy.
To treat my insolence, psychiatrists prescribed me numerous anti-psychotics, including Triftazine, Amitriptyline, Cyclodol, Neuleptil, Chlorprotixen, and several homeopathic remedies, such as Novo-Passit, Triampur and Nootropil. It is worth mentioning that Chlorprothixen interferes with the work of the lungs and is practically guaranteed to kill an asthmatic or just an old man, and therefore it is widely used Russian doctors for dispatching elderly patients: these corrupt doctors are paid by relatives of these elderly people, they want their inheriance as soon as possible and don't want to provide care. So they hospitalized some elderly woman, drug her with Chlorprothixen, and leave laying in a cold damp room for a week, then that gradnma is discharged from hospital with pneumonia, and dies soon after as if from natural cause, and the relatives proceed to grab the inheritance (usually commie-block apartments). Carpe diem.
The next psychiatrist sent me to the infamous Bekhterev's Institute of Human Brain. Before the collapse of the USSR, that organization headed by Natalia Bekhtereva (a daughter of Bekhterev, who became famous for his human experiments) was engaged in petty pseudoscience, the search for magical thought codes and human experiments, which involved removing parts of the patient's brain to study the result. In the 1990s the Institute of Human Brain began massively treating drug addicts with electro lobotomy (brain region responsible for desires killed by an electrode inserted into the skull) and advertising of various frauds, like Vyacheslav Bronnikov's clinic. That way I got to Bronnikov, on "biofield" development exercises, my mother was happy, because she believed in the supernatural. However, I was lucky, because with the comparable chances my life could have ended inside of that infamous Bekhtereva lobotomy clinic, where wise and humane Russian doctors, like Svyatoslav Medvedev (Bekhtereva's son), were prescribing lobotomy as a panacea for all ills. As a side note, that fraudster, Bronnikov, later became a multimillionaire, because evil always prevails in Russia, then leads happy and long life. Yet I'm still thankful to Bronnikov for provided less dangerous and evil fraud venues than the horrifying traditional medicine.