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Russia Revives Debunked LGBT “Mental Disorder” Diagnosis at Psychiatry Congress
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At the XVIII Congress of Russian Psychiatrists in late May 2026, psychiatrist Olga Bukhanovskaya labeled homosexuality and being transgender as a single "mental disorder" caused by propaganda—a claim international medicine retired decades ago.
This was reported by the Russian independent outlet Verstka on May 26.
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From the congress podium, Bukhanovskaya warned colleagues of a "fifth column of trans-LGBT-friendly doctors" and urged the profession to treat what was described as a mental epidemic sweeping the country. The talking points clash, point for point, with the position of every major international medical body.
Homosexuality as an illness
Bukhanovskaya presented homosexuality as a pathology that Russian psychiatry had grown too soft on, urging colleagues to return to what was framed as first principles.
No major medical body has classified homosexuality as a disorder for more than 50 years. The American Psychiatric Association removed it in 1973, and the World Health Organization (WHO) in 1990. The current WHO classification, in force since January 2022, contains no diagnosis that can be applied on the basis of who someone loves.
Being transgender as an illness
The congress was told that transgender identity was a mental illness produced by a sick culture—a confused mind seeking a surgical answer to a psychiatric problem.
The WHO stopped classifying being transgender as a mental disorder in January 2022, moving the diagnosis out of the mental-illness chapter and into one on sexual health. The American Psychiatric Association made a parallel shift in 2013, retaining a diagnosis only for the distress some people experience—not for the identity itself.
The "transgender-spectrum" bundle
Homosexuality, transgender identity, schizophrenia, and transvestism were grouped under a single "transgender-spectrum disorder," with challenges to that grouping dismissed as ideological rather than scientific.
No diagnostic manual recognizes this category. Sexual orientation, gender identity, and conditions like schizophrenia are separate phenomena with different causes and treatments. The bundle is a political construct, not a medical one.
The "epidemic"
The talk warned of an epidemic of transgender identity sweeping Russian youth, blaming Western propaganda, social media, and what was called organized ideological contagion for inflating numbers far beyond anything biology could explain.
The "social contagion" theory has been rejected by more than 60 professional bodies. The Endocrine Society's 2020 position statement found durable biological elements behind gender identity and no evidence that outside influences cause people to change it. Rising visibility, not propaganda, is the mainstream explanation.
Bans as protection
Russia's bans on gender transition were defended as a protective measure shielding vulnerable people from irreversible mistakes, with psychiatry cast as the discipline empowered to intervene before harm was done.
The data shows the opposite. Peer-reviewed research published in JAMA Network Open in 2022 found that access to gender-affirming care substantially reduces depression, anxiety, and suicidality.
After Russia's 2023 ban, the share of transgender people reporting suicidal thoughts rose from 56 percent to 80 percent within six months, according to a separate Verstka investigation.
The promise of a "cure"
The disorders described were presented as treatable by psychiatrists, whose role was framed as reorienting patients toward a "natural state" rather than affirming their identities.
What was described is conversion therapy. The WHO's Pan American Health Organization called it pseudoscientific in 2012. The UN Independent Expert on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity urged a global ban in 2020.
More than 28 countries have outlawed or restricted the practice, and in January 2026, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe urged the rest of Europe to do the same.
The "fifth column"
The address closed by branding doctors sympathetic to LGBT patients as a "fifth column" inside Russian medicine—a hostile faction working against the country from within its own clinics and hospitals.
Doctors who treat LGBT patients without pathologizing them follow the published guidelines of the WHO, the Endocrine Society, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychiatric Association, and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. Calling them a fifth column is a political slur, not a medical argument.
The pathologizing of sexual orientation and gender identity fits into a broader pattern of Russian state institutions treating any deviation from Kremlin-defined "traditional values" as dangerous or extremist.
In early May 2026, St. Petersburg customs officers seized 12.7 tons of British children's books—including titles about dinosaurs meeting Santa Claus, bird parenting, and toddler anatomy—as "extremist literature." State authorities declined to specify what content in the books had triggered the designation.
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