Ireland: Speech by Psychiatrist Declan Lyons on the Persecution of Falun Gong Practitioners
(Clearwisdom.net, August 18, 2003) Thank you for this opportunity to come and
speak with you today. I am speaking above all in a personal capacity but also as
a practicing psychiatrist working at St. Patrick's' Hospital here in Dublin. The
relevance of my professional credentials will become clearer shortly, as I will
highlight how people in China are being drugged into submission for simply
expressing their religious, political or any other views that the Chinese state
takes issue with. I'm not speaking as a Falun Gong practitioner but I have been
a member of "Friends of Falun Gong" and have been struck by the
absolute sincerity and conviction of the Falun Gong practitioners I have met. In
terms of the history of modern medicine, there is little doubt that my
profession of psychiatry has come a long way while some would perhaps correctly
argue that it still has a long way to go.
Mental illness is one of the greatest causes of human
suffering in the world today. No one professional grouping has a monopoly on all
the skills necessary to help people understand and come to terms with mental
distress. Modern psychiatric practice needs to work collaboratively with other
disciplines such as psychology, social work and occupational therapy to even
attempt to deal with the needs, disadvantages and stigma faced by sufferers of
mental illness. Simply classifying people into diagnostic categories is
inadequate and most psychiatrists aren't bigots -- we do recognize the pitfalls
and limitations of this. This is particularly important because in psychiatric
practice we sometimes come into contact with people who are complained about, or
people who don't wish to voluntarily receive treatment for behaviors or beliefs
that are deemed by others to be outside the norm for society. As a result of
this we try to take on board social and cultural factors that influence the
expression of mental illness. We try hard to make diagnoses only in accordance
with internationally agreed criteria and norms. We subject our practice to
outside scrutiny -- so that from next year when new mental health legislation
comes into effect in Ireland, psychiatric doctors will be one of the most
heavily regulated medical specialist groupings. This is being done for good
reason, as the potential exists for psychiatry to be exploited to reinforce not
only social norms but also even political interests.
There is a sinister precedent for this and it comes from the
era of the former Soviet Union. It is widely known how in the 1970s and 1980s
political dissidents were "diagnosed" with sinister syndromes such as
"paranoid delusions of reforming society" and "hippieism"
and were incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals and forced to take anti-psychotic
medication. Thankfully such diagnostic distortions never received international
credibility and Soviet psychiatry was forced to reform as a result of outside
pressure and under threat of expulsion from world professional bodies.
What is happening today in China, however, is the blatant
misuse of psychiatry to act as a direct agent of social control and to be a tool
of that states' suppression of Falun Gong. Since the start of the persecution 4
years ago, a steady stream of practitioners have been labeled as mentally ill
and been detained involuntarily in state forensic psychiatric hospitals. China
learned well from its Soviet cousins and the misdiagnosis of democrats and
political activists as psychiatric patients has peaked and troughed over the
years according to events as far back as the massacre of the 1966 Cultural
Revolution, or more recently the events in Tiananmen Square. Chinese government
reports admit a recent increase in admissions of so-called political cases to
institutions like the Beijing University of Medical Science. We know of between
1500-2000 such admissions of Falun Gong practitioners where families have
refuted the presence of any mental illness.
The treatment administered seems to follow a pattern
consisting of forced administration of anti-psychotic medications in injectable
form, the use of physical restraints and the meting out of electro--convulsive
therapy in a singularly cruel fashion reminiscent of forced medical experiments
in Nazi concentration camps.
If anti-psychotic drugs are administered outside of genuine
clinical indication, side effects can be severe -- these can include severe and
painful muscle spasm, bone marrow suppression, liver damage and even death and
there have been fatalities among Falun Gong practitioners.
Quite simply this perversion of psychiatric practice is
torture dressed up as science. To justify this, some Chinese psychiatrists have
invented diagnoses like 'document crazies' or dysphrenia or qigong induced
psychosis which have no international validity or recognition. Why is China
currently employing psychiatric abuse against Falun Gong practitioners? Apart
from the fact that this is their only way of dealing with dissent I believe the
Chinese state deliberately hopes to discredit Falun Gong by labeling a
proportion of its membership as mentally ill. It is no coincidence that
prominent Falun Gong practitioners have been singled out for this abuse.
Such abuses of psychiatric practice thrive in an atmosphere
of fear and silence where mental health has low status and priority. We have
already seen, however, the damage done to public confidence in psychiatry as a
whole during the era of Soviet abuse. Silence thus is not an option and I am
pleased to tell you that bodies such as the Royal College of Psychiatrists
representing also the Irish College, and the World Psychiatric Association have
condemned all such abuses and plan to send an inspection delegation to gain
unimpeded access to Chinese Psychiatric hospitals and named Falun Gong
practitioners detained there against their will. We need to cultivate an ethos
of caring and sensitivity in treating patients with mental illness in all
societies. To do this China needs first to change its horrifying distortion of
psychiatric practice and protect the rights of its citizens to exercise
religious, political or other freedoms without fear of psychiatric labeling or
incarceration. We are told that China is changing rapidly, modernizing,
developing. To those of us who witness this abuse, however, it seems that the
more it changes the more it remains the same.
We have seen an example recently in Ireland of how people
with physical and mental disability have strived during the Special Olympics to
reach their full potential. This event was about inclusiveness, diversity and
was touching, remarkable and wonderful to behold. What sort of Games will China
conduct towards the end of this decade when the Olympic torch arrives in
Beijing? Will Jiang Zemin's successor be like Hitler in 1936 -- gloating,
flexing intolerant, narrow-minded, nationalistic muscle?
We here in Ireland must tell them about the example we have
set, we must strive to further promote inclusion for people with mental illness
and mental disability.
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