Tag Archives: China

Chinese citizens sent to mental hospitals to quiet dissent

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.

Psychiatric Torture in China: One Child Policy Victim “Treated” with Electroshock, Injections

According to reports by Human Rights Watch and others, in China, psychiatric abuse is shockingly common against dissidents, who are jailed and silenced under the guise of psychiatric treatment. In one well-known case, Wang Wanxing was held in an Ankang for 13 years, for staging a brief, one-man pro-democracy protest on Tiananmen Square on the third anniversary of the massacre there. He was released unexpectedly in 2005 and sent to Germany, where he was evaluated by a team of psychiatric experts, who found no mental disorder. Wang told Human Rights Watch about the conditions he had endured. He stated, for example, that he had been forced to watch staff members administer “electric acupuncture treatments” in which the current used was excruciating. One inmate died of a heart attack during such a “treatment.”

Chinese dissidents forcibly interned in psychiatric hospitals

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”.

Chinese dissidents forcibly interned in psychiatric hospitals

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”.

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.