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

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. 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.

Doctor: Paxil “Especially Notorious” for Causing Withdrawal

Dr. Charles Raison, an associate professor at Emory University, wrote in response to a reader’s question on CNN that about 20 percent of patients experience withdrawal symptoms when they stop taking antidepressants. Paxil is “especially notorious for causing withdrawal problems” because of its short half-life in the body. Paxil is also associated with a number of side effects for those currently taking the medication, including birth defects and depression.

Anxiety and Insomnia Drugs Elevate Risk of Death

Researchers at Universite Laval, Canada, found that using prescription drugs to treat insomnia and anxiety increases one’s mortality risk by 36 percent, even after controlling for lifestyle behaviors that affect mortality rate, such as alcohol use, smoking, health condition and the level of physical activity. The conclusion reached by Professor Genevieve Belleville and his team was based on 12 years of records of some 14,000 Canadians from Statistics Canada’s National Population Health Survey. According to the team, the data comes from surveys which were carried out every two years between 1994 and 2007. It contains information on the social demographics, lifestyle and health of participants between the ages of 18 to 102.

Confronting Bigots Intolerant of Alternative Mental Health Treatment

A long-term outcome study of schizophrenic patients who were treated with and without psychiatric drugs was published in 2007 in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disorders. Funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, research psychologist Martin Harrow, at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, discovered that after 4.5 years, 39 percent of the non-medicated group were “in recovery” and 60 percent had jobs. In contrast, during that same time period, the condition of the medicated patients worsened, with only six percent in recovery and few holding jobs. At the fifteen-year follow-up, among the non-drug group, only 28 percent suffered from any psychotic symptoms; in contrast, among the medicated group, 64 were actively psychotic.