Radio Netherlands: China´s Psychiatric Abuse

In a new report, the Geneva Initiative on Psychiatry (GIP) likens China's abuse of mental health facilities to that of the former Soviet Union. Evidence of the abuse of psychiatry first emerged in China with the crackdown on the Falun Gong spiritual movement.

In this interview with Newsline's Johanna Stoyva, GIP general secretary Robert van Voren describes the situation as a gross violation of human rights and medical ethics.

"It's fairly similar to what happened in the Soviet Union, people are being injected with a neuroleptics, with psychotropic drugs, they're beaten up, they're raped, they are wrapped up in wet linen and when it dries they are squeezed like an orange. That creates excruciating pain. It's punishment, it's maltreatment, it's torture."

RN: "This idea, that most forms of mental illness are caused by politically deviant ideas, does that persist today in official psychiatric theory in China, do they still believe it?"

"Yes. The Chinese do not use the international classification of diseases, as has been developed by the World Health Organisation, they have a Chinese classification of mental diseases, like the Soviets had theirs. They have special terminology for people who have reformist ideas or deviant religious thoughts, and are therefore perceived to be mentally ill."

RN: "So they have a whole system of categories based on political dissidence?"

"They consider reformist ideas and struggle for the truth, or deviant religious thoughts like Falun Gong, as being a form of mental illness. They classify it like paranoia, or schizoid paranoia, or paranoid development of schizophrenia, it's all more or less in the same range the Soviets used."

RN: "Are political dissidents being put in mental asylums?"

"The issue of political abuse of psychiatry came to the forefront because of the situation with the Falun Gong. When the Chinese cracked down on Falun Gong in the late 1990s, large groups of them were incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals, and that's how we found out there was actually something going on. It turns out there are much larger groups of people who wind up in psychiatric hospitals. They are labour activists, they are dissidents. There is a large group of people who have been complaining to authorities for example, local authorities being corrupt, or roofs leaking, all kinds of minor things. And they've been sending complaint letters to the authorities, and they are perceived as being bothersome, so they just lock them up in a psychiatric hospital. It's a very commonly used way of getting rid of bothersome people."

RN: "Would most Chinese psychiatrists believe that political dissidents suffer from mental illness?"

"First of all, psychiatry in China is divided into very rigid sectors. There are four sectors, and only two of them appear to be involved in political abuses. The ones involved are the psychiatry of the Ministry of Safety, and the psychiatry of Ministry of Social Affairs. Not involved are the university systems and the systems of the Ministry of Health; these are the systems that have fairly good contacts with western colleagues and some of them have quite innovative ideas. They appear to be quite shocked that this is actually going on in their country, but they have no contact with the psychiatrists in the other systems."

"The psychiatrists in the other two systems either believe that these people are mentally ill - like many of the Soviet scientists believed that the dissidents were ill - or know very well what they're doing and know they are using psychiatry for non-medical purposes. Either way, what they are doing with people in psychiatric hospitals is a form of torture and therefore it is a breach of their medical ethics and of their whole professional competence, and they should be punished for this, they should be prosecuted."