Background
He is the son of literary critic Tudor Vianu and his wife, Elena.
He is the son of literary critic Tudor Vianu and his wife, Elena.
In an age of indoctrination and terror, he studied first classical philology for two years (1952-1954) as a kind of "self-imposed exile into another world", as he calls it, before studying medicine.
Ion Vianu was one those who signed Paul Goma"s 1977 open letter that expressed solidarity with the Charter 77 movement in Czechoslovakia. This was done, partly, to put the Romanian communist authorities under pressure to allow him to emigrate. As a result he was interrogated by the Romanian"s secret police, the Securitate, harassed, fired from his University job, and eventually allowed to emigrate to Switzerland.
After settling down in Switzerland, he joined the “Geneva Initiative Against Political Psychiatry” and collaborated with Radio Free Europe, discussing attempts to use psychiatry as a form of repression.
After the 1989 Revolution, he became actively involved in the reform of the system of psychiatric treatment in Romania to bring it up to world standards.