Thursday, March 16, 2006

Psychiatric Hospitals for Chinese Dissidents

The former Soviet Union was known to have dissidents declared "insane" as an excuse to lock them away and have them tortured. It's pretty easy to do since so many accepted psychiatric treatments are fairly brutal and designed to break the will. It was no surprise to read in today's New York Times that China does the same thing:

Dutch Doctors Say Dissident Did Not Belong in Chinese Asylum

BEIJING, March 16 — Dutch psychiatrists have determined that a prominent Chinese dissident who spent 13 years in a police-run psychiatric institution in Beijing did not have mental problems that would justify his incarceration, two human rights groups said today.

The psychiatrists spent two days testing the dissident, Wang Wanxing, in Germany, five months after China released him and sent him abroad. They said in a statement that their examination "did not reveal any form of mental disorder."

The report could add fuel to charges that the Chinese police use a network of psychiatric prisons to silence political dissidents, often without trial or right of appeal.

Mr. Wang, now 56, was confined to the psychiatric facility after he was detained in 1992 for unfurling a banner that criticized the Communist Party.
The authorities determined that he had "delusions of grandeur, litigation mania, and conspicuously enhanced pathological will," which Western human rights groups say are diagnoses officials have used to lock up troublesome dissidents who have not broken any laws.

After his release in 2005, Mr. Wang described widespread abuses in the mental asylum, known as the Beijing Ankang. He said he lived in cells with psychotically-disturbed inmates convicted of murder and was forced to swallow drugs to blunt his will. He also said that the facility use electrified acupuncture needles to punish patients while other inmates were made to watch.
...
Human Rights Watch says it has documented 3,000 cases of psychiatric punishment of political dissidents since the early 1980's. The group contends that the use of penal mental asylums to confine dissidents has increased in recent years, as the police have sought ways to punish followers of banned religious sects, political dissidents and persistent petitioners without channeling them through the court system.

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Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Shocking Teens

This is from today's New York Newsday. I love how shock treatment has now evolved into an "aversion therapy":

Family suing over therapy
Freeport teen's mom alleges Mass. center used excessive shock treatment on her son, violating his civil rights

The family of a Freeport teenager is accusing the school district of violating his civil rights by sending him to a Massachusetts facility for troubled youths that uses electric shock therapy.

Antwone Nicholson, 17, and his mother, Evelyn, say he has suffered emotional and physical injuries as a result of being repeatedly shocked at the Judge Rotenberg Center in Canton, Mass., according to the notice of their intent to sue the school district filed last week.

...

An attorney for the Rotenberg Center said the facility tried other therapies on Mitchell, who is diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder, before using shock therapy as "a last resort."

...

Between August 2004 and February, according to legal papers and Mollins, Nicholson was sometimes shocked as many as six times a day with a device that is strapped to students like a small backpack and delivers a 45-milliampere jolt.

Michael Flammia, the attorney for Rotenberg, said students who receive the aversion therapy get shocked an average of once a week for two seconds.

"I've had [the shock] and it feels like a bee sting," Flammia said. "It hurts, but it has no side effects."

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