The project Diagnosis: Free” tells about the “punitive psychiatry” in Ukraine during the Soviet era and the mysteries that were hidden behind closed doors for decades.

Unique SBU archival documents, eyewitness accounts, and stories of victims of such “treatment” and their relatives testify to the terrible system of “punitive psychiatry”.

Dissidents and political prisoners of the Soviet camps, including Stepan Khmara, Joseph Zissels, Semen Hluzman, and Myroslav Marynovych, share their frank accounts of those events. The project also involved researchers of the Sixties, representatives of the SBU archives, the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, and relatives and friends of those who were sent to special psychiatric hospitals.

Each issue of the project is dedicated to a different person who received compulsory treatment in the Dnipro Psychiatric Hospital. For the project, the team of authors organised a filming in Paris to interview Robert van Voren, a researcher of punitive psychiatry. While searching for materials for the programmes, they managed to establish contacts with film crews in Israel, Canada and Spain.