On November 30, 2010, the head of the local police substation said: “Stop saying that Zhao Ziyang was innocent.” I said I would not stop. He then said: “Sign your name on the demolition agreement.” I said no, I did not agree with the terms: they were giving me 100 square meters worth of compensation for 800 square meters. “Since you don’t agree, let’s take this discussion somewhere else!” Ten police officers dragged me into a police vehicle and handcuffed me. They took me to Chaoyang District Shuangqiao No. 3 Hospital, also known as the Chaoyang Mental Health Center, a psychiatric hospital. When I saw the sign, I started to cry. I tried to control my emotions—I said I didn’t break the law and wasn’t ill. They said, “If we say you’re sick, you are sick.” They took me into a room for the seriously disturbed.

There were a total of three people in this room. The other two were not lucid so I had nobody to talk to. There were nurses in this room whose job it was to keep watch on us round-the-clock and who separated me from other patients, not letting me have any contact with them ….

Twenty days later, they wanted to do a blood test, but I wouldn’t let them. They tied me down onto the bed and took my blood forcibly. After the test, they said I had Hepatitis B and forced me to take medicine. It was Risperdal [an anti-psychotic drug known to have potentially fatal side effect]. They told me it was medicine to regulate my moods. After I took the medicine, I had a numbing pain in my whole body, and I felt pain in my head and my heart.

At USA Today last month, Calum MacLeod described the growing use of politically-motivated forced hospitalisations, particularly against petitioners, and the beginnings of legislative action against the practice.

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 ….

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.

In 2010, the Ministry of Public Security ordered that psychiatric hospitals “must not admit anyone who is not a mental patient” without obtaining police approval, an obviously less than airtight safeguard. The previous year, a Peking University professor controversially stated that 99% of petitioners were mentally ill and should be hospitalised for their own safety and that of others, even if most displayed no symptoms. In 2006, the Los Angeles Times reported the story of Wang Wanxing, who was forcibly hospitalised for 13 years after unfurling an anti-government banner in Tiananmen Square on June 3rd, 1992.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: detention, mental hospitals, petitioners, psychiatry, Zhao Ziyang
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Emperor Yongzheng’s suppression of Lü Liuliang’s writings under an invidious system of censorship only spurred more critical reflection on authority devoid of moral suasion

Lü Liuliang, a well-known anti-Manchurian intellectual once said the silence of scholars and officials not only enabled but enacted the abuse of power, and that such scholars also fail in their responsibility to society by not seeking a superior truth ….

[Governor] Mai was worried that beating Tang to death would attract unnecessary public attention. He claimed Tang died of illness in prison, and implied that even God could not tolerate his unfaithfulness. But the truth of Tang’s death soon spread. He had died of suffocation in jail, his body crushed by the placement of sandbags on his chest.

But a year later, Qi Zhouhua, a scholar from Tiantai, Zhejiang Province, wrote to the emperor to voice grievances over Lü’s case …. Similar to Tang, he wanted to rectify the Lü family’s story. And in like turn, the local government also accused Qi of insanity, jailing him for years. In 1767, Qi was executed under the reign of Emperor Qianlong. Among Qi’s personal belongings was Tang’s essay on Zhuge, and along with it, the public exoneration of Tang.

See also posts on punitive hospitalisation for supposed mental illness (“According to one Chinese human-rights NGO, petitioners are ‘today’s most frequent victims of psychiatric abuse.’”) and the recent “illnesses” of Li Tiantian and Yang Hengjun (fortunately less terminal than Tang Sungao’s), via CDT.

At The Useless Tree, meanwhile, Sam Crane looks at the less-than-Confucian reality of Han Dynasty rule and its modern parallels, with reference to Michael Nylan and Thomas Wilson’s “Lives of Confucius: Civilization’s Greatest Sage Through the Ages”:

Looks like The Master was a useful puppet for powerholders, with little real political impact on statecraft. Rulers used “Confucian” priciples when it served their interests, and ignored them when convenient.

And that brings us to the contemporary revival of Confucianism. The past tells us that powerful centralized states in China have been able to present themselves as “Confucian,” without living up to Confucian ideals. They have been “Confucian” only in their words, not their deeds. Of course, this does not mean that there were no individuals who conscientiously enacted Confucian teachings – there were plenty of them. But “Confucianism” (whatever basket of principles and ideas that term might connote) was not the “supreme doctirne of state.” I suspect Legalism had more influence on day to day political decision-making…

And that could be a model for the Chinese Communist Party. It can encourage the revival of Confucianism, wrap itself, when useful, in a shroud of Confucian legitimacy (perhaps the robes are available at your local Confucius Institute), but not really adhere to a consistent or coherent Confucian ideology in terms of actual policy and politics. It worked for the Han, maybe it can work for the CCP.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: CCP, censorship, Confucianism, Han Dynasty, hospitals, psychiatry, qing dynasty, Yang Hengjun
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It has been nearly 35 years since the end of the Cultural Revolution, when mental illness was declared a bourgeois self-delusion and the sick were treated with readings from Chairman Mao. Psychiatric treatment has returned. But mental health remains a medical backwater, desperately short of financing, practitioners and esteem.

Too often, the official response to mental illness is to look the other way. The government authorities, already shaken by an attack the previous month in which eight schoolchildren were stabbed to death, threw a news blackout over the Xizhen incident lest it inspire copycats or incite further outrage.

At least three of six men whose attacks near schoolyards this year left 21 people dead had earlier appeared deranged or suicidal, according to news reports. But in the highest-level statement on the killings, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao said only that China needed to resolve “social tensions” underlying the attacks.

Yan Jun, director of the mental health division of the Ministry of Health, refused repeated requests for an interview. The ministry said in a written statement that the government was “continuously strengthening” both its resources and professionals to provide mental health care.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: mental health, psychiatry, school shootings
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Excerpts translated by CDT:

Reporting from Wuhan, May 27, 2010. Reporter Qin Qianqiao

Between May 26 and May 27, the Ministry of Public Security held a meeting on mental hospitals?ankang yiyuan ????] nationwide. The meeting concluded that hospitals with adequate conditions should center their work around: “interfering ahead of an incident, handling during an incident, admitting patients after an incident, and following up with management.”

According to information, since 1998, mental hospitals nationwide have admitted mental patients who caused accidents 40,000 times. Among these 30% caused serious accidents.

[...] The meeting emphasized: Monitoring mechanisms must be established for mental hospitals. They must resolutely prevent the giving of private favors during legal validation procedures. In the process of admitting mental patients, special attention must be paid to the gate-keeping of admission procedures and objects of treatment. Without checking and agreement from agencies of Public Security, [mental hospitals] must not admit anyone who is not a mental patient.

This news article has been posted on over 1,900 Chinese websites, including national news portals such as sina.com.cn. However, at the time CDT is posting this, most of those webpages within China are quickly disappearing, and many links on Google search are showing error messages.

See also “Video: Chinese Dissidents Committed to Mental Hospitals” via CDT.

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: mental hospitals, notable quotes, psychiatry
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© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: dissidents, petitioners, psychiatry, videos
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In the past 30 years, China’s Communist system of government-assigned jobs and apartments has become a capitalist free-for-all with cutthroat competition for education and work and a widening gap between rich and poor. To cope with the stress, some people are turning to a Western tool: psychotherapy. It’s a radical shift in a nation where focus on the individual was discouraged by both socialist ideology and traditional culture.

“There are great changes happening in Chinese society, and people are more open and pay more attention to their inner mind,” says Zheng Yu, a therapist in Chengdu, about 1,500 kilometers (932 miles) southwest of Beijing.

Mental-health problems affect about 15 percent of the population and account for 20 percent of China’s so-called disease burden — a measure of the financial and other effects of illness, according to the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. That compares with the World Health Organization’s estimate of 13 percent for the worldwide disease burden and may climb to 25 percent by 2020.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: mental health, psychiatry
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During on-line conversations with members of the public, Zhu Rongxian, deputy of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, said 16 million Chinese belong to the “melancholia” group. She put them into three groups – the aged living in endless loneliness, young people tortured by heavy pressure from work or school, and married people constantly in fear of their partners straying.

There are too few psychologists in China to deal with these broken hearts and pining minds. One expert speaking at the Third Annual Meeting of Psychiatry and Psychological Consulting in the United States said there were 550 psychologists and psychiatrists to 1 million people in the USA – yet in China, there were no more than five.

© Liu Yong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2005. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: depression, psychiatry, psychology
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