I'm a psychotherapy student with a casual interest in Soviet history. I've read a little about how psychiatry was used to silence dissidents later in the Soviet period. However, I assume there were also citizens of the Soviet Union with genuine mental health issues, and I wonder how those people were treated. How common was legitimate mental health treatment? Was there a particularly favored style of psychotherapy or psychoanalysis? Was medication common? It just seems like we never hear much about legitimate mental health treatment.
You might want to look into this paper for the opinion of United States psychiatrists visiting the country in 1989. One notable complaint was the Soviet medics Insulin Shock Therapy long after it fell out of use in the States. What can be added: Lobotomy, on the other hand, was banned in 1950 whereas it was performed well into the 80s inside of the NATO block. Fixation and padded rooms have been naturally the same. For the different school and trends in psychiatry in the Soviet Union you can look at this paper. Apparently they were centered around the Universities of Moscow and of Leningrad.
For a history of psychoanalysis there is "Freud and the Bolsheviks" by Martin Alan Miller. Moshe Vladimirovich Wulf was Soviet psychoanalytist who moved first to Berlin and then to Israel and nicely described the Soviet PA scene of the 1920s. The largest fallout happened with Freud attacking Leninism in his "Über eine Weltanschaung" lecture of 1933 and it lasted until the Perestroika. However, you did have some native psych* people which couldn't be pidgeonholed that easily - Pavlov, Vygotsky or Igor Kon.