New York Times: In Rural China, Mental Hospitals Await Some Who Rock the Boat

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

Saturday February 16

It has become common in China for local governments to employ psychiatric commitment as a convenient way to silence troublemakers and pests.

BEIJING, Feb. 15 No one would dispute that Huang Shurong is stubborn and outspoken. She is also smart, confident and articulate, attributes that would seem to leave her poised for success. But not in rural China.

Instead, for her tenacity in protesting a land dispute with her local government in rural Suileng County of Heilongjiang Province in the northeast, officials have had her forcibly committed to a series of psychiatric hospitals, five times in the last three years.

Ms. Huang, who is 42 and divorced, has spent a total of 210 days under lock and key, at times subjected to powerful drugs and electroshock therapy, although friends and family, experts in Beijing and even some of the psychiatrists who have hospitalized her say she is perfectly sane.

"I would agree that I'm strong- willed and very determined, perhaps too determined," she said
recently, shortly being released for the fifth time, after 52 days, by doctors who concluded that they could not justify keeping her.

"I'm not mentally ill," she said. "I know that. And anyone who knows me will say that as well."

Fearing that she would be recommitted if she remained in her hometown, she recently fled with her two teenage children to Beijing, where she survives by selling discarded trash.

Ms. Huang's case is far from isolated.

… Beijing's two-and-a-half- year crackdown on the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement has stirred fresh concern over the political misuse of psychiatry, […]

….. local governments try to employ psychiatric commitment as a convenient way to silence troublemakers and pests.

This includes people like Ms. Huang who aggressively press the government to address their grievances with petitions and protests. Ms. Huang said that during one hospitalization she had shared a ward with five other frequent petitioners.

"The police wouldn't take me in, since I'd done nothing illegal, so they sent me to a psychiatric ward where they had some connections to shut me up and humiliate me," she said over tea at a restaurant in Beijing. There, she said, she was initially given pills and injections that reduced her to stupor and received electroshock therapy as well.

"I was so angry and afraid inside, I just wanted to get out," Ms. Huang recalled of her first
hospitalization, in 1998, after she was picked up in front of her children. "I used my own blood, from a nosebleed, to write a letter. I was worried to death my kids were young and living alone, and I was worried they might drown in the fishpond."

In recent months there have been several reports in the Chinese press of people who have been unjustly committed, including a frequent petitioner named Yang Wenming, who spent two months in a psychiatric ward in Hubei Province in central China before escaping.

A subsequent psychiatric exam found him totally sane, and he is now suing for 1.2 million yuan nearly $150,000 in compensation.

Falun Gong says 1,000 of its members have been forcibly committed.

Officially, Chinese psychiatrists adhere to the same commitment standards as doctors in the West: that people can be hospitalized against their will only if they present a danger to others or themselves.

But in China that standard is not combined with legal time limits on how long a person can he held while the assessment is made.

Also, especially outside big cities, doctors in the relatively young field of psychiatry are poorly
equipped to conduct evaluations and may lack the confidence to defy officials who regard any behaviour that deviates from the norm as a sign of mental illness.

While some have mental illnesses that justify forcible commitment, Chinese psychiatrists say, a large number do not.

To their credit, Chinese psychiatrists repeatedly released Ms. Huang despite pressure from county officials to keep her locked up. But it took them between four and 72 days each time to reach the conclusion that she should be freed.

[…]

… Ms. Huang continued to complain to the office and sought out the county's party secretary. Impatient, she then travelled first to the provincial appeals office in Harbin and later to Beijing, lodging complaints with China's cabinet and Agriculture Ministry. The cabinet ordered the province to "appropriately deal with" her complaints.

That was when the real trouble began.

In early June 1998, while she was walking home from yet another visit to the county appeals office, an unmarked car carrying police officers and officials pulled up beside her, she said. Without explanation, they bundled her into the car, bound her hands and sped off, leaving her two young children alone at the roadside.

Amid tears, screams and protests, she was driven four hours to a psychiatric hospital the Harbin Specialist No. 1 Hospital where she said she was admitted, without examination, to a locked ward. Her children were not informed where their mother had been taken.

When she begged doctors to release her, they said they would "need to discuss the case with county officials," she recalled. Finally she was sent back to her family after 47 days.

To bolster her land case and clear her name, she travelled to Beijing for an extensive psychiatric
evaluation at the prestigious Beijing Medical Sciences University. In their December 1998 report,
psychiatrists described her as "clear-minded" and "talking to the point," with "good self-awareness and no signs of mental illness."

But that paper has not helped her plight. The last three years of Ms. Huang's life have been a vicious cycle of continued protests, forced hospitalisations at the behest of county officials and subsequent release by doctors.

[…]

When hospitalized at the private Chaoyang Hospital near Harbin, she went on a hunger strike and was eventually released when psychiatrists feared that she was "so weak and physically ill" that they could not care for her, said a former staff member, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

[ …]

The last time she was hospitalized, at a large psychiatric hospital in Harbin, the local officials
who dropped her off told the psychiatrists on duty that she was a madwoman who screamed and cursed at officials. The officials paid up front for six months of treatment about 10,000 yuan, or about $1,200 and said she had been categorized as paranoid before.

"They claimed she was a nuisance and a troublemaker and said they were bringing her in for her own protection," said a medical worker at the hospital, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "She didn't even have shoes on when she arrived. We had to buy some.
You could tell they didn't care for her."

The worker added that many doctors had quickly become convinced that there was nothing wrong: "They brought her here claiming she was mentally ill, but after we tested here and investigated her background, we determined that she wasn't sick at all.

"I mean, if you've lost your land and you have a dispute, it's normal to get angry and maybe even curse or lash out. That doesn't mean you have mental illness."

When the appeals office failed to provide past records or other proof of Ms. Huang's history of mental illness, doctors from the hospital were forced to turn detective, travelling to Ms. Huang's distant village to interview neighbours.

"The facts seemed to fit her version of events and not those portrayed by the officials," said the health worker, adding, "The villagers all said: `If Huang Shurong is mentally ill, then we are all loonies.' "

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