A Russian performance artist has severed his right earlobe in protest against his government's use of forced psychiatric therapy for dissidents.

On Sunday, Pyotr Pavlensky climbed onto the roof of the Serbsky psychiatric centre in Moscow and cut himself with a large kitchen knife, before being removed by police and brought to a nearby hospital. 

The Serbsky centre has gained notoriety for a number of cases where dissidents appear to have been confined for political rather than psychological reasons.

Writing on his wife's Facebook page, Pavlensky opposed the return of this Soviet-era practise: “Armed with psychiatric diagnoses, the bureaucrat in a white lab coat cuts off from society those pieces that prevent him from establishing a monolithic dictate of a single, mandatory norm for everyone.”

It is not Pavlensky's first foray into public protest against Putin's government. Last year he nailed his scrotum tot he cobbles of Red Square to highlight the "apathy, political indifference and fatalism of modern Russian society.”