From the outside, it may seem that the path of the Jedi psychologist Nikolai Shcherbakov, among other things, is also a gradual, consistent removal from the state and all its forms of life. It's like with demons. It's best to move away unless you're an exorcist. And further away. And further. Shcherbakov works in a related field — with children of the «risk group» of the Krasnoyarsk Territory, difficult teenagers.
Shcherbakov began as a psychologist in purely government institutions. School, university, kindergarten, two years in a boarding school. And he left: “Once outside, I feel more complete and I can help those inside more. I always felt how our ostentatious education was actually false and nauseating. How is it with Gippius: “Intolerant, false, false!” All would — on long-term psychotherapy! All the same as decades ago, semi-prison installations, pathological personalities and an unhealthy atmosphere. He left so as not to degrade.”
Shcherbakov began to simply take the children for weekends, holidays, and vacations. He issued a guest, then guardianship.
One teenager, another, a third — he was enough. He took hikes in the suburban cliffs and caves. He gave shelter to those in difficult situations. He ran to the guys in psychiatric hospitals and police stations, rescued, searched for, arranged and equipped everything, directed their paths.
The orphans called him a Jedi.
In March 2013, the newspaper (No. 26) wrote about him and his thoughts about orphanages and psychiatric hospitals, where orphans are locked up — not because they are sick, but because they are badly behaved lead. For edginess.
After the text “Childhood of the special regime” was published, Shcherbakov was no longer allowed to visit children in a mental hospital and boarding schools of the 8th type.
But, of course, he did not allow himself to be leveled with dust, he got the commission of the Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia, specialists from the Moscow Research Institute of Psychiatry, to visit. Bottom line: “behavioral” orphans in Krasnoyarsk were no longer placed in mental hospitals, no matter how other orphanage institutions insisted on this; the region has become the leader in Russia in terms of the number of refusals of such hospitalizations.
Shcherbakov at the school fresco. Photo from the personal archive
Shcherbakov with the crisis center for victims of violence «Verba» more than once invited children's doctors from the Moscow Research Institute of Psychiatry with educational seminars. Thus, it was possible not only to get specific guys out of the psychiatric hospitals, but also, it is now clear, to begin breaking up the established system. However, shifts for the better in psycho-neurological boarding schools (PNI) were invariably followed by setbacks, in some ways to the darkest times: in 2020, Shcherbakov began to sound the alarm about “the resumption of the practice of using psychiatry for punitive purposes, and now in relation to adolescents '.