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New York Times: Psychiatrists Rebuke China for Blocking Inspection Visit By ERIK ECKHOLM BEIJING, May 30 - In an unusual public rebuke, the World Psychiatric
Association has called on China to fulfill its promise to let international
experts examine charges that psychiatry has been misused in China as a political
tool.
China's psychiatric practices have been criticized in recent years since
hundreds of members of the outlawed Falun Gong spiritual movement were declared
delusional and were forcibly hospitalized.
The forcible psychiatric commitment of political or labor dissidents on
dubious medical grounds - commonplace during the Maoist fervor of the 1960's -
is also still reported from time to time.
In August 2002, the world association, to which China's government-controlled
psychiatric society belongs, voted to send an expert team to investigate the
charges.
Officials of the group said the Chinese had agreed to cooperate, though
ground rules for a visit were not spelled out.
In subsequent months, the Chinese provided written responses to inquires
about many individual cases involving Falun Gong members, but these only raised
further questions, Western experts said, making a direct visit to China's
psychiatric facilities all the more necessary.
Starting late last year, even the written responses stopped coming.
Plans for a site visit "have been delayed during the past eight months by the
limited collaboration on the part of the Chinese health authorities, in spite of
the efforts of the Chinese Society of Psychiatry, which are gratefully
recognized," the world association said in a statement issued this month.
A committee chairman of the world association, Harold I. Eist, said in a
telephone interview: "Over the recent period they have not responded to requests
for information or gone forward with what had seemed to be a clear willingness
to have a visit. It began dragging on to the point where we felt we had
fulfilled our responsibility to be collegial to a member organization, and so we
issued this statement."
Western experts have debated whether political abuses of psychiatry in China
at this point are systematic or, as some leading experts contend, an infrequent
result of poor training and facilities, especially at the hospitals run by the
Public Security Ministry.
The Chinese professional society has worked over the last two decades to
bring psychiatry in line with world standards, and has generally cooperated with
the recent inquiries, Western experts said. But the political authorities of the
Ministry of Health have apparently blocked further action.
In late April the health minister was fired for his role in playing down the
extent of SARS in China, and the turmoil caused both by SARS and the personnel
changes may delay any decisions in Beijing.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/31/international/asia/31CHIN.html?ex=1054958400&en=ea4385800438562d&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE
Posting date: 6/1/2003
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