Posts Tagged ‘psychiatric hospitals’

Chinese citizens sent to mental hospitals to quiet dissent

Thursday, December 29th, 2011

USA Today – December 29, 2011

By Calum MacLeod

“I have no home or family, I have been detained and tortured by illegal medical treatment,” Wu says. “They have destroyed the latter half of my life. Until the people who illegally handled my case are punished, I won’t close my eyes, even in death.”

ZHENGZHOU, China – The electric acupuncture needles stung her scalp, and the drugs bloated her weight, gave her heart palpitations and brought on premature menopause.

But Wu Chunxia consented to the treatments at the psychiatric hospital because if she didn’t, she knew she would be strapped to her bed and left vulnerable to assaults from violent inmates.

“It was worse than hell in there,” says Wu, 37, of the Henan provincial psychiatric hospital in Xinxiang. “I feared I would be strangled at night by other patients.”

Wu was not at the hospital for reasons of mental health. She was committed there in 2008 by the Chinese government for 132 days as punishment for protesting about local injustice to higher authorities.

The Communist Party does not acknowledge its mental facilities are used to silence critics, but according to numerous human rights groups and Chinese dissidents, China’s Communist-led government has for decades incarcerated healthy people in mental wards to suppress dissent. In the past two years, wrongful confinement cases have sharply increased, says Liu Feiyue of Civil Rights and Livelihood Watch, a human-rights organization based in Suzhou.

The rise in confinements is greatest among petitioners — the ordinary people who complain about local problems, he says. Committing them to mental hospitals is a “quick, convenient and very effective” method for the government to silence criticism.

Now some Chinese officials are pushing back against the political confinements. Prodded by academics, activists and former patients, China’s National People’s Congress is discussing what would be the country’s first ever mental health law.

Minister of Health Chen Zhu told the standing committee of the Congress in October that the new law will curb the abuse of involuntary hospitalization and better protect the rights of the mentally ill. Chen blamed “procedural failings” for cases of forcible treatment that were challenged by victims and families.

Despite several shortcomings, the draft legislation represents both a legal and social milestone for the world’s most populous country, says Wang Yue, a psychiatry professor at Peking University.

“Only once a society develops to a certain level does it pay more attention to mental health and forced hospitalization,” says Wang, who alludes to wrongful confinements in mental wards in the U.S. in the early 1900s, though such cases were not attempts by the government to silence political opponents.

“In China, we have long had the principle of big government and small society, and only now are we moving toward judicial supervision and a society ruled by law,” he says. “We must solve the problem of treating those mental patients who need treatment and not hospitalizing people who don’t.”

Complaining to higher authorities

The number of wrongful confinements has risen because the number of Chinese who demand justice for personal matters has grown, Liu Feiyue says. They are reviving an ancient Chinese system of seeking redress by taking a complaint directly to higher authorities. They are determined, often desperate, he says, and thus troublesome to the authorities who are well aware their careers can be ruined by disquiet.

Xu Wu, 43, a former security guard, had grown suicidal after four years of incarceration, including electric shock treatment, for petitioning authorities about a wage dispute with his employer. In April, after watching a film in which kung fu star Jet Li escapes from jail, Xu copied Li’s moves by loosening his cell bars over three nights and escaped from the mental hospital in the Yangtze River port Wuhan.

He fled by train to Guangzhou, 600 miles south, where a hospital test concluded he was sane. He was seized eight days later by plainclothes Wuhan police outside the Guangzhou television station where he had just described his plight on-air. Media coverage, including video of his re-capture, helped secure Xu’s release on June 10, the same day the initial draft law was released for public comment.

He has read it and is pessimistic about its effectiveness. “I hope the new law will help other patients, but it will be hard to implement, like all laws in China,” Xu says.

His lawyer sounds more optimistic.

“The law will reduce the abuse of power and the confinement of healthy people,” says Huang Xuetao, director of the Equity & Justice Initiative, a non-profit based in Shenzhen, south China. She welcomes the revisions adopted in the latest October draft, including removal of the catch-all “risk of public disorder” reason for involuntary hospitalization, but urges further revision before the law is finalized sometime in 2012.

Last month, with the help of Equity & Justice, Xu Wu and four fellow victims of forced hospitalization appealed to the National People’s Congress for patients to be permitted to enlist outside representatives to help appeal their diagnosis and confinement.

In China, only the person or organization that applied for a patient’s forced commitment can apply for his or her release.

“The ideal would be for every involuntary hospitalization case to be examined and verified by judicial authorities, as happens in some U.S. states,” Huang says. “But in China at present, that’s just not realistic.”

Persistence pays off sometimes

Wu Chunxia won her release from the psychiatric hospital in Xinxiang by threatening suicide and persistently demanding her case be investigated, she says. Now she is battling for justice and compensation both through China’s courts, despite their lack of independence from the Communist Party, and the more traditional route of petitioning higher authorities, the very act that, while legal, got her detained in the first place.

She has had some success. Officials revoked the police decisions to punish her petitioning first by detaining her, then by committing her to a labor camp, a decision later changed to confinement in the mental hospital. The policeman who handled her case, Zhang Xiaodong, told USA TODAY he doesn’t know Wu. But earlier this month, in an interview with Southern Metropolitan News, Zhang blamed his treatment of Wu on orders from the local political-legal committee, a Communist Party group that guides judicial work. Committee secretary Li Zongxi declined to comment.

Corruption plays a major role

Rights activist Liu says officials commit troublemakers to mental hospitals because the process is secretive and, unlike the courts, requires no evidence of wrongdoing. He says the full extent of wrongful confinement in recent years far exceeds the 1,000 cases his group has compiled in a database since 2009.

Corruption also plays a major role. Unethical doctors and hospital administrators can benefit financially by allowing police to turn hospitals into “black jails,” Liu says.

For these reasons, Liu says the new law will remain “just a piece of paper” until China undertakes “systematic change, to a society that genuinely respects law and human rights.”

Even accepting the current draft over nothing may be a devil’s bargain, warns Nicholas Bequelin, a Hong Kong-based researcher for Human Rights Watch. “A bad law will entrench bad practices and would extend too much the power of public security officials to detain people on the basis of their political opinion or other irrelevant aspects,” he says.

China has failed to adopt the international norms for mental health law set out in the United Nations Convention on Rights of Persons with Disabilities, despite its ratification by Beijing, Bequelin says. The draft lacks provision for people to be assisted by lawyers and fails to prohibit the “political use of psychiatry,” he says.

Wu Chunxia is encouraged by the pending legislation. “It shows more attention paid to human rights in China,” she says. “I hope the law stops normal people suffering the persecution I had.”

Two years after Wu filed a suit against both the hospital and the neighborhood officials who committed her, a court in nearby Shenqiu County held its first hearing in October. Now she is petitioning the provincial court to speed the process and asking police to investigate the policeman Zhang Xiaodong.

“I have no home or family, I have been detained and tortured by illegal medical treatment,” Wu says. “They have destroyed the latter half of my life. Until the people who illegally handled my case are punished, I won’t close my eyes, even in death.”

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/story/2011-12-28/china-mental-hospitals/52260592/1

Watch: G Edward Griffin on Psychiatry and Politics as a form of Government Control:

 

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Drugging the Vulnerable: Atypical Antipsychotics in Children and the Elderly

Thursday, May 26th, 2011

TIME
By Maia Szalavitz
May 26, 2011

Maryland Correctional Institution, Jessup, Maryland - Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post/Getty Images

Pharmaceutical companies have recently paid out the largest legal settlements in U.S. history — including the largest criminal fines ever imposed on corporations — for illegally marketing antipsychotic drugs. The payouts totaled more than $5 billion. But the worst costs of the drugs are being borne by the most vulnerable patients: children and teens in psychiatric hospitals, foster care and juvenile prisons, as well as elderly people in nursing homes. They are medicated for conditions for which the drugs haven’t been proven safe or effective — in some cases, with death known as a known possible outcome.

The benefit for drug companies is cold profit. Antipsychotics bring in some $14 billion a year. So-called “atypical” or “second-generation” antipsychotics like Geodon, Zyprexa, Seroquel, Abilify and Risperdal rake in more money than any other class of medication on the market and, dollar for dollar, they are the biggest selling drugs in America. Although these medications are primarily approved to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, which combined affect 3% of the population, in 2010 there were 56 million prescriptions filled for atypical antipsychotics.

In a presentation this week at an American Psychiatric Association meeting, Dr. John Goethe, director of the Burlingame Center for Psychiatric Research in Connecticut, reported that over the last 10 years, more than half of all children aged 5 to 12 in psychiatric hospitals were prescribed antipsychotics — and 95% of these prescriptions were for second-generation antipsychotics. Many of these children didn’t have a condition for which the drugs have been shown to be helpful: 44% of youngsters with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and 45% of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) were treated with them.

Pharmacologically, the ADHD prescriptions make no sense: FDA-approved drugs for the condition raise levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine, while antipsychotics do they opposite, lowering them.

Geothe also noted another study that showed that the number of office visits by children and teens that included antipsychotic drug prescriptions rose 600% from 1993 to 2002. “The obvious second-generation bias is very apparent in these data, as is the irrational use of antipsychotics for indications such as PTSD and ADHD for which there is no controlled evidence whatsoever that these are safe or effective treatments,” says Dr. Bruce Perry, senior fellow at the ChildTrauma Academy in Houston. (Full disclosure: Dr. Perry is my co-author on two books.)

The situation may be similar in state-run juvenile detention systems. Late last week, an exposé by the Palm Beach Post revealed that antipsychotics were among the top drugs purchased by the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice (DJJ), and were largely used in kids for reasons that were not approved by the government — for instance, sleeplessness or anxiety. The Post reported:

In 2007, for example, DJJ bought more than twice as much Seroquel as ibuprofen. Overall, in 24 months, the department bought 326,081 tablets of Seroquel, Abilify, Risperdal and other antipsychotic drugs for use in state-operated jails and homes for children.

That’s enough to hand out 446 pills a day, seven days a week, for two years in a row, to kids in jails and programs that can hold no more than 2,300 boys and girls on a given day.

Among the psychiatrists hired by the state to evaluated incarcerated kids, about a third received drug company money, the Post reported. Those 17 psychiatrists wrote 54% of the prescriptions for antipsychotics; the 35 doctors who did not take such payments wrote the rest. In other words, one-third of doctors — all of whom were paid by drug companies — wrote more than half of all antipsychotic prescriptions for the state’s locked-down youth.

The statistics on children in foster care are equally alarming. Youth in foster care are not only three times as likely to be medicated as comparable low-income youth on Medicaid, but more than half are treated with antipsychotics. It is not likely that all or even most of these children have a condition for which antipsychotics have been approved by the government to treat.

Among the problems with unnecessary use of antipsychotic medications is that they can cause serious, sometimes irreversible, damage. Atypical antipsychotics are associated with weight gain and may double users’ risk of Type 2 diabetes. Recent research also suggests that they may shrink the brain and there is little data on how they affect brain development during the teen years, when the brain grows more than at any other time but infancy. Indeed, youth are more vulnerable than any other group to the drugs’ worst side effects (excluding death).

“The majority of antipsychotic medication use in children and adolescents has not been limited to the few age groups or conditions for which there is credible evidence of efficacy and safety,” says Perry. “There is no reason to expect irrational prescribers to change their bad habits.”

He adds that many experts would argue that if doctors began prescribing antipsychotics “responsibly and cautiously” — that is, being mindful of the lack of efficacy data and the evidence of harm — the rate of prescriptions in children would drop by 90%.

Meanwhile, rates of prescriptions for patients at the other end of the lifespan are also out of control. In nursing homes, 14% of residents have been given at least one prescription for a second-generation antipsychotic, according to a government investigation. A full 88% of these prescriptions are given to people with dementia, despite the fact that these drugs may double the risk of death in these patients (there is a black box warning on the drug to this effect). The investigation estimated that $116 million Medicare dollars have been spent filling antipsychotic prescriptions that never should have been written.

So why are these drugs so widely prescribed? Aggressive drug company marketing is only one part of the story. A key reason they are overused in institutional settings is that they are sedating, making patients easier to manage. Secondly, unlike other sedative drugs, they are not associated with misuse (with the possible exception of Seroquel, which has fans among some addicts). In fact, most people resist taking antipsychotics, which is why overmedication is much more common in settings where people are locked-in and compliance can be forced.

The second point — that these drugs are not considered addictive — by itself probably accounts for a big part of why drug companies have been able to get away with so much misleading marketing and the resultant overprescribing. Although prescribing of traditional sedatives like benzodiazepines (Valium, Xanax), which are vulnerable to misuse, is limited by their status as controlled substances, few people enjoy misusing antipsychotics (side effects like weight gain, pleasurelessness, movement disorders and low energy and motivation are not generally sought by recreational drug users), so they can be prescribed for unapproved uses like behavior control and sleep-inducement in children and the elderly.

In other words, addiction is basically seen as a worse side effect than death. The fact that the most vulnerable youth and elderly often cannot advocate for themselves has made it easier to sweep the problem under the rug.

Fortunately, there is at least one bright spot in this depressing picture. The main patent on Risperdal expired in 2007, and those for Zyprexa and Seroquel expire this year. Geodon’s patent expires next year, while Abilify’s comes up in 2015. When most drugs go off-patent, drug companies’ marketing pressure — and profits — will subside, perhaps keeping children and the elderly safer from inappropriate medication.

Read article here:  http://healthland.time.com/2011/05/26/why-children-and-the-elderly-are-so-drugged-up-on-antipsychotics/

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Chinese dissidents forcibly interned in psychiatric hospitals

Saturday, October 30th, 2010

AsiaNews.it  October 30, 2010

Report reveals scandalous cases of dissidents subjected to years forced of hospitalization, systemic shock treatments and chains. Human Rights Watch: this is what the Chinese Communist Party has done since it took power. Nobel Liu Xiaobo: dozens of his friends are under arrest, forbidden to go to claim his prize.

Hong Kong (AsiaNews / Agencies) – A “campaign” to denounce the numerous abuses against those who protest or present petitions in China and because of this have been detained in psychiatric hospitals, beaten, subjected to electric shocks and sedatives. The activist Liu Feiyue explains that the campaign “SOS Mental Hospitals” wants to make public the many victims of this “system”.

Xiao Yong, an activist of the Civil Rights and Livelihood Watch, speaking to Radio Free Asia about Gu Xianghong, who protested the abuses imposed by family planning authorities, the office in charge of enforcing the general prohibition on having more than one child.

“Since 1992 – explains Xiao – [Gu] has attempted to protest the abuse through official channels”, in short by presenting petitions higher authorities for justice.

As a result, Gu has on many occasion been interned in Hospital No. 5 of Xiangtan (Hunan).

Xiao and another activist Zheng Chuangtian filmed a video of Gu, who speaking with some difficulty, denounces being subjected to electric shocks and repeated injections against her will and that he has been interned in the hospital 9 times.

“My entire family was ruined by the village authorities- she says – because I have made petitions … I have been interned here for revenge and forced to undergo injections.” “They won’t let me go … I can not get clear answers from them.” “They have applied electrodes to my temples and turned them on” – she says – “They have covered my head and chained my feet.”

Xiao and Zheng managed to enter the Hospital No. 5 in secret, by outwitting surveillance, then they were caught and locked up for a while.

Gu’s mother, Xu Meijiao, is held by the authorities.

Xuetao Huang, a human rights lawyer, wrote in a report released Oct. 10 that many psychiatric hospitals accept patients without mental illness, at the request of public authorities, because they are well paid.

“The level of implied consent [in these practices] in the psychiatric profession – Huang reports – is growing at a terrifying rate.”

The hope is that these complaints will bring some results: the authorities have given great prominence in recent months to punishments imposed on 5 Henan officials for having sent Xu Lindong, a petitioner, to Luohe City Mental Hospital, on false documents. Xu (pictured) remained interned for 6 ½ years, was locked up 50 times, tortured with electric batons 55 times.

In a 2002 report, “Dangerous Minds”, Human Rights Watch complained that the Chinese Communist Party has always considered “political dissidents, believers, the authors of protests and other dissidents” a major social threat”. These people are often “forcibly interned in psychiatric institutions of various kinds.”

But experts note that coercive methods are still applied by the authorities, even at high levels. They observe that after the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the democratic dissident Liu Xiaobo, the authorities have dozens of dissidents and activists put under close surveillance or house arrest, they have cut their phone lines or follow them everywhere and many have been ordered to leave Beijing and return to their city of origin. His wife, Liu Xia is under house arrest and her connection to Twitter cut off, after she posted an open letter on the Internet to 143 Chinese celebrities and activists asking them to go in her place to Oslo to receive the award for her husband, sentenced to 11 years in prison for crimes of opinion.

The Christian writer Yu Jie has been under house arrest for 12 days. The South China Morning Post said authorities “are afraid” that Liu’s friends “will go to the ceremony to receive the award”.

Note: CCHR is the only organization to have drafted a Declaration of Mental Health Rights that must be universally adopted.  There are virtually no rights granted to anyone psychiatry deems mentally ill, and given that psychiatric diagnoses are strictly a matter of opinion, given that there is no medical test to “prove” who is mentally ill, it is imperative that a set of guidelines for patient’s rights be adopted that address the issue of human rights in the field of mental health.  Read the Declaration here: http://www.cchrint.org/about-us/declaration-of-human-rights/

Read the article from AsiaNews.it here: http://www.asianews.it/news-en/Chinese-dissidents-forcibly-interned-in-psychiatric-hospitals-19865.html

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Under China’s Current System of compulsory mental health treatment, healthy people are being forced into psych hospitals

Tuesday, October 12th, 2010

Note from CCHR:  To watch PBS News Special Report  on political dissidents and petitioners in China who are being sentenced to psychiatric hospitals: click here http://3.ly/F5d

Asia One

by Shan Juan

BEIJING – Members of the legal profession have warned that loopholes in China’s current system of compulsory mental health treatment are at risk of forcing healthy people into psychiatric hospitals.

A report compiled by two civil charities, the Psychosis and Social Observation and the Shenzhen-based Hengping Institute, pointed out the abusive and disorderly use of the system, which has been in practice for more than 100 years.

The report, released on Sunday, World Mental Health Day, was based on a three-year study of more than 100 cases of forced psychiatric treatment, 30 laws and regulations on the subject, as well as 300 news reports.

It was issued following recent media reports about forced treatment for the healthy people in psychiatric hospitals.

“In many cases, it’s because the current system of compulsory mental health treatment is abused,” said Huang Xuetao, a lawyer and legal aid volunteer based in Shenzhen.

Under the current system, people can be sent to asylums for treatment against their will by blood relatives or spouses, who only need to claim that they are suffering from a serious mental illness.

Once committed, they are only eligible to be discharged from the hospitals by those who had them committed in the first place. Afterward, the person who had them committed automatically becomes their guardian.

“In most cases, they were sent to hospitals at the request of their relatives, with whom they probably had an economic dispute”, said Huang.

In the hospital, they were forced to take medicine, receive injections or undergo operations, he said, citing some cases of forced psychiatric treatment.

Li Renbing, a lawyer at the Sino Promise Law Firm in Beijing, said: “These people had no right to appeal while in hospital. Even after they were discharged and appealed against their confinement, the compensations they received were usually very low.”

Zhu Jinhong, whose mother had her sent to a psychiatric hospital in East China’s Jiangsu province following a property dispute in March, said: “I was wrongly diagnosed as having mental illnesses and was hospitalized even before the doctors met me.”

After being kept there for almost 200 days, she was rescued by a group of lawyers and journalists, according to earlier media reports.

“Dozens of nurses surrounded me and gave me medicine against my will,” she recalled.

Some psychiatric hospitals admit mentally healthy people for economic reasons, rather than those of health, Huang said.

“I am shocked at the way some doctors think,” he said. “In their pursuit of profit, they have no morality.”

Some law enforcement agencies like the police have been reported of abusing their power and sending people who they assume to be mentally ill or pose a danger to public security for psychiatric treatment, according to the report.

Read the rest of the article here: http://health.asiaone.com/Health/News/Story/A1Story20101012-241843.html

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New Jersey Is Sued Over the Forced Medication of Patients at Psychiatric Hospitals

Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010

New York Times
by Richard Perez-Pena
August 3, 2010

Patient advocates filed a federal lawsuit on Tuesday charging that New Jersey psychiatric hospitals routinely medicate patients against their will without a review by an outside arbiter, a practice that is banned in most other states.

Twenty-nine states require a judge’s ruling for involuntary medication, according to the suit, including New York, Connecticut and other large states, like California, Florida and Texas. Five other states leave the decision to an individual or panel outside the hospital. Some states also provide an advocate to represent a patient in a hearing on forced medication.

But in New Jersey, state rules allow a patient in a state hospital to appeal medication decisions only to people in the hospital. The lawsuit contends that the internal appeal process is routinely ignored and that psychiatric patients in private hospitals lack any opportunity to appeal medication regimens at all.

The suit, filed in Federal District Court in Trenton by the group Disability Rights New Jersey, seeks a court order requiring the state to provide judicial review of involuntary medication. It notes that a prison inmate has more power to contest treatment decisions than a psychiatric patient.

The drugs forced on patients include powerful medications for conditions like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. They help many people with those diseases function better, but can have serious side effects, including diabetes, tremors, seizures, high blood pressure, obesity, sedation, aches and impaired mental function.

“As a patient in a state hospital, it’s your legal right to refuse and go through a process, but you get severely penalized if you try,” said W. Emmett Dwyer, litigation director of Disability Rights New Jersey, a federally financed organization. “They view you as noncompliant with treatment. They give you an injection instead of a pill. And they tell you if you don’t take it, you won’t get out.”

There are about 1,800 patients at any given time in New Jersey’s five state psychiatric hospitals, and 1,000 in private ones.

Michael D. Reisman, a lawyer with Kirkland & Ellis, which is helping bring the lawsuit, said recent records from one state hospital showed that fewer than 20 percent of patients contested their medication.

But the advocates and several former patients said many more objected to their prescriptions but submitted quietly, rather than risk painful injections or a longer hospital stay. Others, they said, are too medicated to object.

“When I said no, they just shot me up instead, so pretty soon I gave up,” said Alice Hsia, 34, who has been in and out of hospitals for schizophrenia. “The times I was sedated, I would sign anything they wanted.”

Mr. Reisman said the question often was not whether some medication was needed, but rather one of dosage or a desire to try a “different drug with fewer side effects.” Some hospital

psychiatrists do not take such concerns seriously, he said, but “a judicial hearing would give the patient more leverage and force the doctors to listen.”

The State Department of Human Services, which runs the hospitals, declined to comment on the suit. But among advocates for the mentally ill, there are wide-ranging opinions on involuntary treatment.

Phil Lubitz, associate director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness of New Jersey,  said he did not see forced medication as a major issue, noting that it was extremely difficult to get patients committed in New Jersey, and that most who were presented “a danger to themselves or others.”

But Robert Davison, executive director of the Mental health Association of Essex County,  called New Jersey’s policy “beneath contempt.”

Yana Paskova for The New York Times

Joseph Cichowski said he would have challenged forced medication if he had the opportunity.

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

Alice Hsia said she submitted to prescriptions at hospitals quietly rather than risk painful injections.

Read the entire article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/04/health/policy/04psych.html

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Renowned human rights lawyer—Persecution of Chinese political dissidents under guise of psychiatric treatment increasing

Monday, May 31st, 2010

The Epoch Times
By Gao Zitan
May 30, 2010

Although Beijing has always denied charges of psychiatric abuse of dissidents, the National Conference of Ankang Asylums held by the Ministry of Public Security in Wuhan, Hubei Province, on May 26 and 27 has inadvertently admitted these charges.

Ankang Asylums are special psychiatric hospitals administered by the police. According to a document issued by the Ministry of Public Security on January 29, 1988, Ankang hospitals serve two functions: to maintain social order and to provide medical treatment. The document also points out that Ankang hospitals, as a special means of maintaining societal control, are an integral part of the public security services.

As of now, there are 22 Ankang hospitals in China, and the ministry has asked that at least one Ankang asylum be set up in each province, according to a report in state-run China Daily on May 29.

The recently-held National Conference pointed out that Ankang hospitals should play a more important role in social surveillance and control, and that they should work closely with public security bureaus, police stations, and criminal investigation units. It also stressed that Ankang hospitals should not admit anyone who is not mentally ill “without the approval of public security bureaus.”

People from mainland China read it as an indirect admission that Ankang hospitals can detain perfectly sane people as long as it is approved by the police. They comment that, in the past, police have incarcerated mentally healthy petitioners into psychiatric hospitals without a word. Now they send out a warning.

Persecution under cover

Zhang Ningzan, a renowned human rights lawyer told The Epoch Times that persecution, especially of political dissidents and petitioners under the guise of psychiatric treatment, occurs more often nowadays.

News broke on April 25 that a peasant named Xu Lindong from Henan Province was locked up in a mental hospital for six and a half years for supporting his neighbor Zhang Guizhi in a land dispute between Zhang and the township government. He was shackled 48 times and given electric shocks 54 times during his incarceration.

Ding Hongyun, deputy head of the Psychiatric Hospital of Luohe in Henan Province explained that Xu was incarcerated because of his insistence on visiting Beijing to lodge complaints against the local government, thereby disrupting social order, according to a China Youth Daily report.

Yangcheng Evening News reported on April 9 that Peng Baoquan and Deng Fuhua, two residents of Shiyan, a city in Hubei Province, were detained in a mental hospital because they took pictures of a protest.

According to Civil Rights and Livelihood Watch, on April 22, 2009, Pan Xiang, a citizen of Baoying County, Jiangsu Province, was kidnapped by local police and detained in a Yangzhou psychiatric hospital for nearly two months. Pan had asked the authorities to provide him with a letter allegedly written by Wen Jiabao in response to an earlier letter sent by Pan. He was forced to take medication, and as a result of an allergic reaction, developed edema in his legs.

Read entire article:  http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/36505/

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New York Times exposes psychiatric abuse of Foster kids: Children are put in psych wards for disciplinary reasons

Thursday, May 13th, 2010

The New York Times
By A. G. Sulzberger
May 13, 2010

A federal lawsuit is seeking to bar New York City from allowing troubled foster-care children to be kept in psychiatric hospitals after doctors have recommended their release, a practice that routinely adds months to a hospitalization despite laws that require such children to be placed in the least restrictive environment possible.

The suit, filed on Wednesday in United States District Court in Brooklyn, claims that the practice means that children who no longer require hospitalization are being kept in locked quarters where they have limited access to schooling, family visits and even walks outside.

The suit also claims that the Administration for Children’s Services, which oversees the care of about 16,000 foster children in New York City, and its subcontractors have been “using certain psychiatric hospitals as if they are detention centers,” sending some children to hospitals for disciplinary reasons, like breaking curfew, running away or getting in fights, rather than for mental health reasons.

A spokeswoman for the city’s Corporation Counsel declined to comment on the suit, saying the city had not yet had a chance to review it.

The suit was filed by the Legal Aid Society on behalf of three unnamed foster-care children who are currently hospitalized despite doctors’ recommendations that they be released.

“Every day that it continues, plaintiffs’ extended, wrongful confinement in these institutions is causing them irreparable damage,” the lawsuit says.

One of the children, a 6-year-old boy identified as S. M. who was placed into foster care last year, was hospitalized in Westchester in January, after “misbehavior” in his foster home, according to the complaint. The boy, who was in kindergarten, has been ready for discharge since April 2.

Read entire article:  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/nyregion/13acs.html

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