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19-04-2016, 07:00 PM
An honorable member of the Coffee Shop Has Just Posted the Following:
Political Psychiatry: How China Uses ‘Ankang’ Hospitals to Silence Dissent
Apr 19, 2016
In this May 11, 2012 photo, a nurse brings food to a patient who refused to leave her bed at a psychiatric hospital in Zouping county, in eastern China's Shandong province. PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS
Reports continue to tell of repression of rights lawyers and dissidents — lawyer Pu Zhiqiang was formally disbarred earlier this month — but little is said of other serious illegalities that should provoke concern. Notably, human rights groups have long charged that one of the crudest examples of illegality in Chinese criminal procedure is the political use of psychiatry to detain, imprison, and forcibly medicate dissidents and activists.
The use of this tactic, borrowed from the Soviet Union early in the Maoist era, was reduced after the Cultural Revolution, but revived in 1987 with the creation of psychiatric hospitals, administered by the police, called Ankang (“peace and health”) institutions. Media reports throw light on the systematic violation of human rights in the psychiatric hospitals operated by China’s Ministry of Public Security.
In one case, a prominent Chinese dissident was confined in 1992 to an Ankang after he was detained for demonstrating in Tiananmen Square against the June 4, 1989 crackdown on political activists. He was held there until he was released in 2005. The practice has continued. According to Radio Free Asia, the China Rights Observer group has tracked more than 30 cases of activists “who were forcibly committed to psychiatric institutions in 2015, often without their relatives’ knowledge or consent.”
In an interview with Radio Free Asia, the group’s founder, Liu Feiyue, said that despite China’s passage of a Mental Health Law in 2012, authorities continue to send activists and petitioners to psychiatric hospitals, where they may face at times abusive conditions. RFA reported one case of a Shanghai petitioner who was detained on a petitioning trip to Beijing by ”interceptors” hired by Shanghai authorities. The petitioner was then forced to take medications, beaten, and tied to a bed for two days and nights.
When China adopted the Mental Health Law in 2012, Nicholas Bequelin, then a researcher at the advocacy group Human Rights Watch, noted that it provided for an independent review of involuntary commitments of mentally ill persons. However, he also emphasized that China’s Ministry of Public Security maintained its authority to administer the Ankangs, of which there were already 22 across the country.
The U.S. State Department Country Report on Human Rights Practices for 2014, citing the Legal Daily, reported that from 1998 to May 2010, more than 40,000 persons were committed to Ankang hospitals.
The treatment of persons committed to Ankangs has been criticized by foreign psychiatrists and human rights advocates, but details have not often emerged because of the secrecy maintained by the Public Security Ministry. One report, however, by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD) in 2013, found that the detention of a petitioner in 2007 for more than seven years was “arbitrary.”
Xing Shiku had been repeatedly tortured and beaten after traveling from Harbin to Beijing to petition against corruption and the privatization of a state-owned company where he had once worked. The WGAD ruled that Mr. Xing had been confined “because of the peaceful expression of his views and filing complaints to government authorities” and the Chinese government had not demonstrated that he was “a threat to other persons or property,” the standard in the Mental Health law for committing a person to a psychiatric facility.
The reports quoted here support the analysis of the most authoritative study of the political uses to which psychiatry is put in China today, “China’s Psychiatric Inquisition: Dissent, Psychiatry and the Law in Post-1949 China” (London: Wildy, Simmonds and Hill, 2006) by Robin Munro, a China scholar and human rights advocate now with the China Labour Bulletin. As one reviewer wrote, “The assertion that there is a systematic political abuse of psychiatry to punish political dissidents lays an allegation of the most egregious forms of human rights abuse at the feet of the Chinese state.” (Susan Biddulph, The China Journal, No. 59, January 2008, 162.)
An attempt in 2002 by the World Psychiatric Association to send an international delegation to China to visit psychiatric hospitals was refused by the Chinese government. Despite the seriousness of the systematic perversion of psychiatry discussed here, there has been surprisingly little foreign criticism, undoubtedly because of the secrecy that has shielded it from foreign view. Enough is publicly known to suggest the need for further efforts to expose the longstanding illegality of Chinese political psychiatry.
Click here to view the whole thread at www.sammyboy.com (http://www.sammyboy.com/showthread.php?228403-Wah-Everything-learn-from-LKY&goto=newpost).
Political Psychiatry: How China Uses ‘Ankang’ Hospitals to Silence Dissent
Apr 19, 2016
In this May 11, 2012 photo, a nurse brings food to a patient who refused to leave her bed at a psychiatric hospital in Zouping county, in eastern China's Shandong province. PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS
Reports continue to tell of repression of rights lawyers and dissidents — lawyer Pu Zhiqiang was formally disbarred earlier this month — but little is said of other serious illegalities that should provoke concern. Notably, human rights groups have long charged that one of the crudest examples of illegality in Chinese criminal procedure is the political use of psychiatry to detain, imprison, and forcibly medicate dissidents and activists.
The use of this tactic, borrowed from the Soviet Union early in the Maoist era, was reduced after the Cultural Revolution, but revived in 1987 with the creation of psychiatric hospitals, administered by the police, called Ankang (“peace and health”) institutions. Media reports throw light on the systematic violation of human rights in the psychiatric hospitals operated by China’s Ministry of Public Security.
In one case, a prominent Chinese dissident was confined in 1992 to an Ankang after he was detained for demonstrating in Tiananmen Square against the June 4, 1989 crackdown on political activists. He was held there until he was released in 2005. The practice has continued. According to Radio Free Asia, the China Rights Observer group has tracked more than 30 cases of activists “who were forcibly committed to psychiatric institutions in 2015, often without their relatives’ knowledge or consent.”
In an interview with Radio Free Asia, the group’s founder, Liu Feiyue, said that despite China’s passage of a Mental Health Law in 2012, authorities continue to send activists and petitioners to psychiatric hospitals, where they may face at times abusive conditions. RFA reported one case of a Shanghai petitioner who was detained on a petitioning trip to Beijing by ”interceptors” hired by Shanghai authorities. The petitioner was then forced to take medications, beaten, and tied to a bed for two days and nights.
When China adopted the Mental Health Law in 2012, Nicholas Bequelin, then a researcher at the advocacy group Human Rights Watch, noted that it provided for an independent review of involuntary commitments of mentally ill persons. However, he also emphasized that China’s Ministry of Public Security maintained its authority to administer the Ankangs, of which there were already 22 across the country.
The U.S. State Department Country Report on Human Rights Practices for 2014, citing the Legal Daily, reported that from 1998 to May 2010, more than 40,000 persons were committed to Ankang hospitals.
The treatment of persons committed to Ankangs has been criticized by foreign psychiatrists and human rights advocates, but details have not often emerged because of the secrecy maintained by the Public Security Ministry. One report, however, by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD) in 2013, found that the detention of a petitioner in 2007 for more than seven years was “arbitrary.”
Xing Shiku had been repeatedly tortured and beaten after traveling from Harbin to Beijing to petition against corruption and the privatization of a state-owned company where he had once worked. The WGAD ruled that Mr. Xing had been confined “because of the peaceful expression of his views and filing complaints to government authorities” and the Chinese government had not demonstrated that he was “a threat to other persons or property,” the standard in the Mental Health law for committing a person to a psychiatric facility.
The reports quoted here support the analysis of the most authoritative study of the political uses to which psychiatry is put in China today, “China’s Psychiatric Inquisition: Dissent, Psychiatry and the Law in Post-1949 China” (London: Wildy, Simmonds and Hill, 2006) by Robin Munro, a China scholar and human rights advocate now with the China Labour Bulletin. As one reviewer wrote, “The assertion that there is a systematic political abuse of psychiatry to punish political dissidents lays an allegation of the most egregious forms of human rights abuse at the feet of the Chinese state.” (Susan Biddulph, The China Journal, No. 59, January 2008, 162.)
An attempt in 2002 by the World Psychiatric Association to send an international delegation to China to visit psychiatric hospitals was refused by the Chinese government. Despite the seriousness of the systematic perversion of psychiatry discussed here, there has been surprisingly little foreign criticism, undoubtedly because of the secrecy that has shielded it from foreign view. Enough is publicly known to suggest the need for further efforts to expose the longstanding illegality of Chinese political psychiatry.
Click here to view the whole thread at www.sammyboy.com (http://www.sammyboy.com/showthread.php?228403-Wah-Everything-learn-from-LKY&goto=newpost).