A dissident Russian journalist who was forcibly held in a psychiatric ward after exposing the abuse of children in the same unit fears she will be locked up indefinitely if she continues to speak out about her treatment.

Larissa Arap, 49, spent 46 days in a psychiatric hospital, where she claims that she was heavily drugged and humiliated in an echo of the way dissidents were locked up for fictitious mental illnesses in Soviet times.

Miss Arap told The Sunday Telegraph last week that when she was released from the hospital in Russia's northern Murmansk region on Monday, doctors warned her that she would be locked up again if she talked about her experiences.

"They told me that if I would share what happened, it would affect my family and I would end up there again and I would never leave," said Miss Arap, who sounded weak and emotional as she spoke from her flat in Murmansk. The journalist has received support from Russia's Independent Psychiatric Association, which claimed people were being locked up for criticising bureaucrats.

Yury Savenko, the organisation's president, said he knew of another woman confined in a hospital in Moscow after she was accused of harassing a former minister. "There is a tendency for more and more authoritarianism," he said.

Although doctors released Miss Arap, she said they still forced her to sign a document agreeing to outpatient treatment and refused to tell her what drugs she was given in the hospital. She has since gone to court to try to be released from the treatment and for her confinement to be declared illegal, although the planned date for the hearing has been postponed until further notice, a move she claims is designed to allow the health authorities to retain power over her. "They are stretching the process out," she said.

Miss Arap, an activist with former world chess champion Gary Kasparov's United Civil Front opposition coalition movement, was arrested on July 6 while she was at a clinic for a medical check-up in order to get a driver's licence.

Her family say she was locked up for co-authoring a report alleging abuses at psychiatric units.

The journalist said she was beaten before being taken to a local psychiatric hospital, a place where she had previously alleged that children had suffered mistreatment. Her criticism had appeared under the headline "Madhouse" in a newspaper connected to Mr Kasparov's coalition. "I was openly told that I would be punished because I had told about what happens in psychiatry," said Miss Arap.

Her case has been compared to the Soviet period when psychiatric hospitals were used to repress dissidents.

Mr Savenko, who was appointed by Vladimir Lukin, the Russian human rights ombudsman, to lead a commission, said Miss Arap was unwell but should not have been forcibly confined. "It is far from the only case," he added.

Vladimir Bukovsky, the Soviet dissident who was one of the first to expose the practice in the Seventies, warned about the return of punitive psychiatry in a recent interview with The Sunday Telegraph. "Anything is possible in Russia. We live in a twilight zone," he said.

Mr Bukovsky was diagnosed as a "psychopath" in the Sixties and forced to receive treatment in a Soviet psychiatric hospital.

Miss Arap was freed from her internment after mounting media pressure, just a week after Mr Lukin called for her release. Her release orders came after the Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB, spoke to the chief doctor at the psychiatric hospital.

She was also given medicine when she left the hospital, said Yelena Vasilieva, a local activist for the United Civil Front, which helped publicise the case. Ms Vasilieva added that it was an unusual measure in the cash-strapped Russian medical world. The drugs are to help Miss Arap recover from the heavy doses she was given when she stayed in the hospital.

"Her release was a victory for us," said Mr Kasparov in a statement issued through a spokesman. "We will continue the legal battle to punish those responsible."