Traditional values have largely endured attempts by Western institutions to impose a positive image of deviant behavior. For instance, in spite of the removal of homosexuality from the nomenclature of mental disorders, in 2014 62.5% of 450 surveyed psychiatrists in the Rostov Region viewed it as an illness, and up to three-quarters viewed it as immoral behavior. The psychiatrists sustain the ban on gay parades and the use of veiled schemes to lay off openly lesbian and gay persons from schools, child care centers, and other public institutions. In a 2013 inverview with Dozhd, Russia's chief psychiatrist, Zurab Kekelidze, said that Homosexuality was continuously defined as a mental disorder by the Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia in 2005, when its president, Savenko, expressed his surprise at the proposal by the executive committee of the American Psychiatric Association to exclude homosexuality as a mental disorder from manuals on psychiatry. At the time he attributed this reclassification to political pressure from western NGOs and governments, called it antipsychiatric, and stated that the reasoning behind it was ideological, social and liberal rather than scientific. Savenko later changed his mind about homosexuality, and in a 2014 joint paper with Alexei Perekhov he stated that those who continue to advocate for classifying homosexuality as a mental disorder exhibit a Soviet mentality.
