(Clearwisdom.net) Radio Free Asia reported on May 7 that the American Psychiatric Association held its 157th Annual Meeting during May 1-6, 2004 in New York City. More than 2,000 psychiatric experts from around the world and doctors from China attended this five-day conference.
Other than exchanges on various aspects of psychiatric practice, education and research, the attendees also discussed the Chinese government's psychiatric abuse of Falun Gong practitioners and dissidents by treating them with "special drugs."
According to a report by China Mental Health Watch, more than 100 mental hospitals in more than 23 Chinese provinces, cities and autonomic regions were used to persecute Falun Gong practitioners with psychiatric treatments. It has been verified that 15 of the 961 Falun Gong practitioners who were tortured to death died from nerve-damaging drugs.
Dr. Wang Wenyi from Mount Sinai School of Medicine said at the conference that since summer 1990, more than 1,000 Falun Gong practitioners were forcibly sent to mental hospitals, where they were injected with psychotropic drugs and electro-shocked. They were perfectly healthy before they were sent to the hospitals.
Wang Wanxing, the man who unfurled a banner that read "Reinstate the facts about June 4 1989 Massacre" in Tiananmen Square, has been locked up in a mental hospital for 12 years and was labeled with monomania by the Chinese government. His wife said he was perfectly healthy, but the Mental Illness Administration under Beijing Police Department refused to release Wang Wanxing. According to China's regulations, people diagnosed with monomania would be confined for life if he or she causes harm to the society, which means Wang Wanxing may never regain his freedom.
The 2002 meeting of the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) was held in Yokohama, Japan. During the meeting, a resolution was passed to request the Chinese government to cooperate with an investigation of the abuse occurring in Chinese mental hospitals. The Chinese government turned down the request and has refused to allow a delegation to inspect China's mental hospitals.
Before the 2002 WPA meeting, New York-based Human Rights Watch and International Foundation in Holland jointly published a 289-page report. It said that based on various sets of available data, over 3,000 people had been sent to psychiatric hospitals for "political causes" over the past two decades. This report was based on statistics and cases published in official Chinese psychiatric publications.
In 1977, the World Psychiatric Association approved the Declaration of Hawaii, followed by the Declaration of Madrid in 1999, setting out ethical guidelines for the practice of psychiatry. One guideline specifically emphasized psychiatric treatments including drugs and electro-shock shall not be used on mentally healthy people. This guideline was made because the former Soviet Union abused political dissidents this way. A writer and dissident from the former Soviet Union wrote a book that described how the Soviet government punitively sent dissidents to mental hospitals. The WPA was going to expel Moscow from the international organization because of its psychiatric abuses, forcing the Soviet Union to withdraw from the association. Russia was allowed to re-join after Gorbachev ended these violations through reform.
Dr. Daniel Monti, a psychiatrist from Philadelphia, was angry at China's abuse of Falun Gong practitioners. He said, "I'm sorry to see that psychiatric treatments are used to persecute a group of good people. It has happened before in the Soviet Union. In dictator regimes, when people's opinions differ from that of the government, they would be persecuted. The government would say they have mental problems and they were hallucinating."
Although China's psychiatric abuse has been widely publicized and the WPA has strongly demanded an independent investigation, the thousands of newspapers, magazines, TV stations and radio stations in China have yet to make a single report on the subject, not to mention criticizing the government's actions.
In the Soviet Union, people who were put away in mental hospitals included dissident poets and writers, and they became members of the "insane". Meanwhile, the dictator who sent the order to persecute people is regarded as normal.
China has followed in the footsteps of the former Soviet Union and went even further by throwing healthy Falun Gong practitioners who have no political motives into mental hospitals. Dr. Monti said, "The Chinese leaders who persecute Falun Gong are the ones who are mentally ill."
