Overview of the historical development of mental health services in the Region

The countries in the Region differ in the degree to which they have been involved as territories and cultural settings in the emergence of Western Civilization. Whereas the countries of Central Europe such as Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary have been fully integrated in the processes of carving human individuality out of a diffuse primitive group identity reaching back several centuries and variously referred to as capitalist development, scientific revolution or Renaissance, the countries further East or Southeast,such as Russia, Ukraine and the Balkan states have stayed peripheral to these concerns largely because of their own major preoccupation – the Eastern Orthodox Religion and the Ottoman Empire.The resemblance between these two groups of countries, revealed to the observer when the Berlin Wall fell, turned out to be more apparent than real and quickly wore out as soon as the regimes of total control were toppled and the peoples were free once again to get in touch with their own histories and cultural processes.

For reasons of simplicity the countries of the former Eastern block will be referred to throughout the chapter as ‘the Region’. The list of these countries will include the Newly Independent States (e.g. Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova), the countries of the Caucasus region (e.g. Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan), the countries of Central Asia (e.g. the KirghizRepublic), the Baltic countries, the Balkan countries (e.g. Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Romania, Albania, Croatia, Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina) and the countries of Central Europe.