Blame George Harrison: Drug Use and Psychiatry in Communist Yugoslavia

In 2009, reporters from a Serbian news magazine posted a video from the Crna Reka monastery in the south of Serbia. Shot within a room adorned with Orthodox icons, the video showed a young drug addict being repeatedly beaten with a shovel and brutally punched in the face by a man wearing brass knuckles, while another “therapist” orders the young man to stay in place. The release of further videos revealed that such “treatment” was a typical component of a rehabilitation programme which had been running since 2005 at seven locations across the country. As one former patient recounted, “[i]n the yard, they gather the addicts in a circle to watch the ‘bad one’ get beaten…. They hit him with clubs, shovels, fists, bars, belts, whatever they get their hands on.”1 Upon its release, the footage shocked many within Serbia, leading members of the government and most of the Church hierarchy to condemn the Crna Reka programme.