Falun Gong Practitioners Locked Up in Mental Hospitals

Like many other mental hospitals in China, the Minkang Hospital and Beigu Hospital in Suining City, Sichuan Province were renovated to be used by the government to detain and persecute Falun Gong practitioners who are perfectly normal, healthy, and sane. In these hospitals practitioners are forcibly injected with drugs that damage the central nervous system and cause long-term mental and physical disabilities, including the inability to speak, disorientation, etc.

Practitioners Mr. Wang Zhengfan and Ms. Lu Yanfei have suffered in these mental hospitals, and provide their accounts.

Mr. Wang Zhengfan, a forty-year-old middle school teacher was detained in the Minkang Mental Hospital numerous times in attempt to force him to renounce his belief in Falun Gong. Both his school principal, Qin Xuebin, and his neighbourhood association collaborated with the local police station to persecute him. Mr. Wang was arrested again in January 2014, and incarcerated in Minkang Hospital, where he remains to this day.

Ms. Lu Yanfei is in her sixties. She was formerly the director of Chuanshan District Women’s Association in Suining City, and a member of the Township People’s Council. She has been incarcerated numerous times in various locations, including the Minkang Mental Hospital.

Ms. Lu was arrested by agents from the Suining City 610 Office (an organisation of special agents just for persecuting Falun Gong) on March 2nd, 2006, and transferred to Beigu Mental Hospital. Ms. Lu went on a hunger strike to protest the persecution, however doctor Li Xudong at the mental hospital forcibly injected some drugs which impaired sensation and mobility of her tongue for three days.

She was later transferred back to Minkang Hospital where she was tied up and injected with an unidentified liquid by Nie Hong. She was also force-fed and injected with large doses of unknown drugs. As a result, she became blind, bald, mentally disoriented, had a stiff neck, a weak body, and she was unable to fall asleep. She also salivated uncontrollably and suffered swollen legs and loss of memory.

After being on a hunger strike for seventy-five days, Ms. Lu was taken home by her seventy-year-old aunt and uncle. Her aunt and uncle were forced to agree on three conditions:

1. They would not provide Ms. Lu with any financial support.
2. They would not help her with medical expenses (she was fired from her job for refusing to renounce Falun Gong, and her husband was forced to divorce her).
3. She was forbidden to contact any Falun Gong practitioners.