The Serbsky State Scientific Center for Social and Forensic Psychiatry (Russian: Госуда́рственный нау́чный центр социа́льной и суде́бной психиатри́и им. В. П. Се́рбского) is a psychiatric hospital and Russia's main center of forensic psychiatry. In the past, the institution was called the Serbsky Institute (Всесою́зный нау́чно-иссле́довательский институ́т о́бщей и суде́бной психиатри́и и́мени В. П. Се́рбского). From the late 1960s to the early 1980s, the center was used to control and punish Soviet dissidents.

The Institute started in 1921, and was named after Russian psychiatrist Vladimir Serbsky. One of the main stated purposes of the institute was to assist in forensic psychiatry for the criminal courts. Moscow Serbsky Institute conducts more than 2,500 court-ordered evaluations per year.

The Institute also claimed leadership in studying different types of psychosis, brain trauma, alcoholism and drug addiction. One celebrity treated for an addiction was Vladimir Vysotsky. The Serbsky Center is now headed by Zurab Kekelidze (ru), the chief psychiatrist of the Ministry of Health and Social Development of the Russian Federation, whose dissertation was on sluggish schizophrenia. Kekelidze is known to believe that homosexuality in some cases is a mental disorder and has not been excluded from the list of mental disorders.

In the Soviet Union, dissidents were often declared mentally ill. In almost all cases, dissidents were officially examined at the Serbsky Central Research Institute, which evaluated individuals accused under political articles. Typically declared mentally ill, indictees were sent for involuntary treatment to dedicated hospitals in the MVD system. In the 1960s and 1970s, the procedure became public and evidence of "psychiatric terror" began to appear. The majority of incarcerations date from the late 1960s to the early 1980s.

Alexander Esenin-Volpin, Viktor Nekipelov, Suren Arakelov and Zviad Gamsakhurdia were among the victims. Gen. Pyotr Grigorenko was determined as insane in the Serbsky Institute because he "was unshakably convinced of the rightness of his actions" and held "reformist ideas."

In the 1960s Soviet psychiatry, particularly Serbsky Institute Director Dr. Andrei Snezhnevsky, introduced the concept of "sluggish schizophrenia", a special form of the illness that supposedly affects only social behavior, with no effect on other traits: "most frequently, ideas about a struggle for truth and justice are formed by personalities with a paranoid structure", according to the Serbsky Institute professors. Most prisoners, in Viktor Nekipelov’s words, characterized the Serbsky Institute professor Daniil Lunts as "no better than the criminal doctors who performed inhuman experiments on the prisoners in Nazi concentration camps."

The Center underwent many changes after the Soviet Union collapsed. Psychiatry is not used as a weapon against dissenters, according to Center Director Tatyana Dmitrieva. The rooms where Soviet dissidents were imprisoned were changed to treat alcohol and drug addicts.

Many psychiatric trials were pursued in order to protect high-ranking officials involved in rapes and murders, such as Yuri Budanov (he was convicted only after more than three years of trials).^{[citation needed]}