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Friday, June 20, 2025

Autism in Russia


Ayman Eckford at The Moscow Times:
One of the biggest issues in talking about autism in Russia is that it is extremely difficult for adults to be recognized as autistic.

Although Russia officially recognizes the World Health Organization’s norms and uses the ICD-10 medical standardization system (though not the updated ICD-11 codes). Instead, doctors often rely on outdated Soviet-era standards, where autism is equated with childhood schizophrenia, which means that autistic people automatically have their diagnosis changed when they turn 18.

This results in autistic adults not only being denied support and recognition but also facing an increased risk of forced institutionalization. In Russia, there are many jobs you cannot get if you are diagnosed with schizophrenia, and the social stigma is extremely severe.

And this automatic diagnosis change is not just a relic of the Soviet past — it remains alive in medical education. In 2015, I spoke to a medical student at one of Saint Petersburg’s top universities. He told me that, according to his curriculum, distinguishing autism from schizophrenia is extremely difficult.

There is a deeper ideological reason for this.

The stereotype of autism as a form of schizophrenia is not just medical incompetence. It is not a political myth, rooted deeply in Russian history.

During the Soviet era, many political dissidents were forcibly hospitalized and given diagnoses like schizophrenia or sluggish schizophrenia. The latter was a fictional disorder created by Soviet psychiatrists after World War II.