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Psychiatrists to probe abuse reports in China
AP/Daily Telegraph, Aug. 27, 2002
http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-china27.html
August 27, 2002
BY HANS GREIMEL
YOKOHAMA, Japan–The world’s leading psychiatric association decided Monday to investigate reports that China is silencing political dissidents by confining them to mental wards, where some–including members of the Falun Gong sect–are drugged or undergo electric shocks.
The World Psychiatric Association voted to send a fact-finding team to China, a move that could lead to Beijing’s expulsion from the professional brotherhood if it resists the investigation as it has other similar missions in the past.
The group said that among those reportedly detained in mental hospitals are nearly 500 members of Falun Gong, a spiritual sect outlawed by China in 1999 for allegedly threatening national security. Thousands of its followers have been arrested and sent to labor camps.
”We are concerned they have Falun Gong members who are not patients in their hospitals,” outgoing association president Juan J. Lopez-Ibor told the World Congress of Psychiatry, gathering Monday in Yokohama.
”I am concerned about the abuse of psychiatry,” he said.
In some cases, individuals without mental problems allegedly have been forced to take psychiatric drugs and given electroshock treatment, sometimes as punishment for their political views, the association said, citing reports from international nonprofit organizations and family members.
A British group of psychiatrists that sponsored a motion to confront Beijing, claimed that Lopez-Ibor had violated the association’s charter by failing to allow a vote on expelling China now. Similar charges of psychiatric abuse led the Soviet Union to withdraw from the World Psychiatric Association in 1983 as the other members prepared to expel them. Soviet psychiatrists were readmitted in 1989 after doctors there released hundreds of dissidents from confinement.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson visited China last week and said the detention of Falun Gong members in psychiatric wards was an ongoing problem. She also said that UN officials have had difficulty getting permission to investigate the alleged abuses.
Chinese officials vehemently deny holding political opponents in mental institutions.
But part of China’s effort to crush the Falun Gong has been a propaganda campaign that often uses photos and accounts of how alleged members went insane and hurt themselves or others.
In its vote Monday, the association–which represents professional groups from 105 nations–said it wants to inspect China’s hospitals by May after working out ground rules with Chinese authorities.
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