Psychotherapist Anatoly Kashpirovsky died
In the late 1980s, the Soviet psychotherapist became famous thanks to his television “health sessions.”
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Anatoly Kashpirovsky, who gained all-Union fame in the late 1980s thanks to television “health sessions,” died at the age of 88.
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Anatoly Kashpirovsky became famous in the late 1980s thanks to mass televised psychotherapy sessions on central television of the USSR.
Anatoly Kashpirovsky died at the age of 88. In the late 1980s, the Soviet psychotherapist became famous thanks to his television “health sessions”, which attracted millions of viewers to the screens.
TV presenter Andrei Malakhov announced Kashpirovsky’s death. The information was confirmed to RIA Novosti by Kashpirovsky’s director, Sergei Rudykh.
Kashpirovsky is a native of the Khmelnitsky region of Ukraine, a psychiatrist by training. Before gaining fame, he worked for more than 20 years in a psychiatric hospital in Vinnitsa.
In 1989, Kashpirovsky began conducting “health sessions” on the central television of the USSR. These sessions gathered a significant audience in front of the screens and were remembered by many for the phrase he regularly repeated: “I give you an instruction...”.
Kashpirovsky argued that with the help of psychotherapeutic influences - settings and hypnotic pauses - he could not only improve the psychological state of people, but also help cure chronic diseases.
Some TV viewers, especially older ones, argued that Kashpirovsky’s sessions really had a beneficial effect on their condition.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, television sessions of healers and psychics became widely popular in the USSR and then in Russia. One of the most famous, along with Kashpirovsky, was Allan Chumak: during his television shows, viewers placed cans of water in front of the screen, which, as Chumak claimed, he could “charge.”
Official medicine and scientists were skeptical about the methods of Kashpirovsky and Chumak, explaining the possible effect of their sessions by self-hypnosis and the placebo effect. In 1993, the Russian Ministry of Health banned mass sessions of psychotherapy and hypnosis in the media.
Kashpirovsky, on the wave of popularity, was elected to the State Duma of the first convocation from the LDPR party, and in 1995 he left for the USA, where he held “health meetings”, focusing mainly on the Russian-speaking diaspora.
In the 2000s, Kashpirovsky again began performing regularly in Russia and other countries of the former USSR. In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, he started a YouTube channel where he conducted live broadcasts and “wellness streams.”
In June 2011, the Savyolovsky Court of Moscow satisfied Kashpirovsky’s claim for the protection of honor and dignity against VGTRK and the chief psychiatrist of the Ministry of Defense Vladislav Shamrey. The reason was Shamrey’s allegations that Kashpirovsky’s television sessions harmed people’s health. The court decided to recover 100 thousand rubles from each of the defendants, but in September of the same year the Moscow City Court overturned this decision and completely rejected Kashpirovsky’s claim.
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