Healthy Chinese Petitioners Subjected To Forced Psychiatric Treatment

Subjecting healthy citizens to forced psychiatric treatment is a routine practice under the Chinese Communist Party. This is done in the name of maintaining stability. Recently, a website that defends rights in China published it’s annual report on China’s mental health and human rights in 2013. The report revealed that many petitioners faced forced psychiatric treatment. The following is our report.

Human rights organization ‘Civil Rights and Livelihood Watch’ published it’s annual report on February 13. It has been closely following activists being forced into psychiatric hospital treatments.

The report revealed that a wide range of Chinese people are forcibly treated in psychiatric hospitals. They range from all sections of society, including a party secretary, judge, university faculty staff, to a butcher. It also includes migrant workers, but mostly, it consists of petitioners, who are healthy citizens. Cases of psychiatric abuse are widespread in China, including in Liaoning, Anhui, Hunan, and Shanghai. Included in the report is the case of petitioner Xing Shiku, from Harbin in Heilongjiang Province. He is currently detained under forced psychiatric treatment.

Xing Shiku’s wife Zhao Guirong explains that her husbands rights were seriously violated during the reorganization of his work unit in 2006. He went to Beijing to petition, but in 2007, the healthy Xing Shiku was abducted. He was illegally detained in a psychiatric hospital.

To defend her husband, Zhao Guirong also went to Beijing, hoping to resolve the issue. However, Zhao Guirong was repeatedly kidnapped back to Heilongjiang and tortured in a black jail.

Zhao Guirong, Harbin resident: “There is no freedom, even our lives and health are threatened. Release my husband! Let my family be reunited! No one should deprive our rights of freedom. My basic human rights deserve to be respected! I am afraid that if my husband stays in hospital any longer, they will kill him. When I was detained in the black jail, they poisoned me.”

The annual report also lists ten most prevalent psychiatric tortures that were reported in 2013. This includes being tied up, long-term imprisonment in a solitary cell, forced ingestion of medicines, and force-feeding through the nose. Among all the tortures, these were deemed by eye-witnesses as the most terrifying means. The victims of electric shock torture are often left with burned temples.

Hu Jia, Beijing activist: “It is even darker than other tortures. In the psychiatric hospitals, it is not about physical work, but it destroys your mind. It develops an intimidating obedience. I myself was almost subjected to forced psychiatric treatment.”

The Chinese Communist regime abuses psychiatric diagnoses in order to detain 
and brutally persecute healthy individuals. Many victims of this treatment are the largely persecuted Falun Gong practitioners. Jiang Zemin initiated the persecution of Falun Gong in 1999. Since then, a high number of Falun Gong practitioners have been confirmed disabled, mentally tortured, or simply missing, because of forced psychiatric torture.

US-based Falun Gong Human Rights Working Group published a report in 2012.
It detailed 1,089 cases, where more than 150 hospitals were conducting abusive torture and forced psychiatric treatments on Falun Gong practitioners.

The report concluded that many healthy Falun Gong practitioners throughout China have been subjected to forced injections, and feed with unknown drugs. This treatment under detention in psychiatric hospitals and rehabilitation centers damages the central nervous system. Some individuals were left paralyzed or partially paralyzed. Others were left blind or deaf, with permanent damage to muscles and organs, or with loss of memory. Other cases showed sudden death through seizures.

The tight censorship blockade on information by the regime suggests these reported cases are only the tip of the iceberg. The actual number of persecuted victims in the psychiatric hospitals is yet unknown.，

Tang Jitian, Beijing human rights lawyer: “It is largely due to abusive powers of the police and the authorities. Ordinary Chinese people can expect to have no rights and no security. This reflects a lack of boundaries with officials actions, including the defining mental illness and forced treatment.”

Although the CCP regime abolished the notorious labor camp system, petitioners continue to be illegally detained. They are now being kept in the newly emerging “Admonition and Education Center for Non-Normal Petition.” These centers have appeared in Nanyang, Zhumadian, Dengzhou , and Xinxiang.

Hu Jia: “With the abolition of the labor camp system, forced psychiatric treatment is sure to become more prevalent. It will take over the function that the labor camp system previously had, of detaining Falun Gong practitioners, activists, petitioners and dissidents. Some officials might employ other criminal means to continue it’s persecutory acts. The CCP was fully prepared before it made the move to abolish labour camps.”

Hu Jia comments that the only way to completely eliminate problems such as the forced psychiatric treatment or black jails is to end the ruling one-party dictatorship - See more at: http://www.ntd.tv/en/programs/news-politics/china-forbidden-news/20140214/95551-healthy-chinese-petitioners-subjected-to-forced-psychiatric-treatment.html#sthash.OqXq1tfD.dpuf