Classifying dissidents as being insane

In the old days of Soviet dictatorship, the regime classified dissidents as being mentally ill. After all, surely someone who is insane would fail to see the glories of communism. At least, that was the thinking of the hacks that identified themselves as psychiatrists and who were acting on the orders of the Soviet hierarchy would have everyone believe.

Even the Cuban psychiatrists acting under the orders of their masters were doing the same thing to Cuba’s dissidents. Cuban dissidents who were charged with political crimes (non-violent opposition to the regime in one form or another), were arrested and interrogated by the State Security apparatus, and then were treated horribly as psychiatric cases confined among the criminally insane. In Cuba, psychiatrists must cooperate with the State Security apparatus or face reprisals, arrest, and punishment by the communist government; thus, there is no opposition to speak of within the medical profession to the regime.

In November 2010, a troubling article on Chinese psychiatry and local politics appeared in the New York Times. Headlined as Assertive Chinese Face the Risk of Being Locked Up as Insane, it featured the case of Xu Lindong, a poor farmer from Yancheng county in Henan province, central China, who stepped up to help a neighbor over a land dispute. According to his neighbor (Mrs. Zhang Guizhi), a meter-wide strip of land near her home was illegally appropriated by the local government and given to a wealthy neighbor.

As Mrs. Zhang is polio-ridden and unable to read, Xu Lindong decided to help her. He pressed her case a number of times, but she lost the case in court. He then tried to file a complaint against the local government, but was intercepted on the way while that complaint being lodged. According to Times writers Sharon LaFraniere and Dan Levin, “The government's response was to draw up an order to commit him to a mental hospital—and then to forge his brother's name on the signature line.” The British Medical Journal, which published an account of the arrest back in June (Xu was released in April), supplied additional details: “On the outskirts of Beijing he was intercepted by a Daliu township government official and a policeman, taken home, and subsequently incarcerated in Zhumadian Psychiatric Hospital, Henan, at the request of township and county government officials.”

Having been diagnosed as mentally ill, Xu was detained for six and a half years. In Zhumadian Psychiatric Hospital and one other Chinese hospital, according to Times writers LaFraniere and Levin, he “endured 54 electric-shock treatments.” He also was “repeatedly roped to his bed and routinely injected with drugs powerful enough to make him swoon.”

It doesn’t surprise me one bit that the Chinese government abuses its citizens, especially when the citizens attempt to exercise their human rights and obtain justice. The Chinese government’s interpretation of human rights and justice is still in the Dark Ages.

The ‘treatment’ that Xu was subjected to was not for his wellbeing but rather simply as a means of punishment and nothing more.

Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), previously known as electroshock, is a well-established, albeit controversial, psychiatric treatment in which seizures are electrically induced in anesthetized patients for therapeutic effect. Today, ECT is most often used as a treatment for severe major depression which has not responded to other treatment, and is also used in the treatment of mania (often in bipolar disorder), and catatonia. It was first introduced in the 1930s and gained widespread use as a form of treatment in the 1940s and 1950s; today, an estimated 1 million people worldwide receive ECT every year, usually in a course of 6–12 treatments administered 2 or 3 times a week.

Are we to believe that Xu was suffering from severe depression, bipolar disorder and catatonia (when the body remains in a fixed position) when he was filing a complaint against dishonest government officials?

According to his brother, who spent four years trying to locate him, Xu was unrecognizable when he was finally traced in 2007. Just as distressing: Xu had not been in the least bit deranged. What he had been, his brother insists, was persistent in helping his neighbor seek justice. He had planned to file a complaint because he was angered by his neighbour’s mistreatment. And for exercising his rights to complain (something the rest of us in democratic nations have the right to do) he was locked up as a psychiatric patient. And China maintains that they have its citizen’s wellbeing at heart.

The political ramifications of people who are entirely sane being locked up because government authorities view them as nuisances isn't helped, or diminished, by a chief of forensic psychiatry at Peking University responding in this way to the case: “I have no doubt that at least 99 percent of China's pigheaded, persistent ‘professional petitioners' are mentally ill.” I honestly believe that if his masters told him to publicly state that the world is flat, he would make such a public statement.

The psychiatrist in question, Dr. Sun Dongdong, quickly apologized, LaFraniere and Levin note, for what he said was an ‘inappropriate’ remark. Inappropriate, but stated all the same—and to the New York Times, the British Observer, and several other major newspapers that reprinted the shocking story. The British Medical Journal titled its own news report, China's Psychiatric Hospitals Collude with Officials to Stifle Dissent.

I guess when his own peers ridiculed him; he realized that he was faced with the prospect of living with the reputation of being a government quack, a legacy he didn’t want following him when he passes on.

In the New York Times article, Xu Lindong was pictured, desperately thin, after his six-and-a-half year ordeal. His brother and other siblings were heartbroken when they finally discovered him, only to find him barely recognizable. “My brother was as strong as a bull,” his elder brother is quoted as saying. “Now he looks like a hospital patient.” He was a hospital patient. No. Let me rephrase that statement. He was a prisoner.

Two days after a local newspaper in China reported on the case, followed by China Youth Daily, a national publication, Xu was released. Four ‘local officials were fired,’ the Times authors add, including the man who served as the county Communist Party secretary when Mr. Xu was committed.

Predictably or not, the comments section of the Times quickly lit up with angry charges after the report appeared. Readers defending China's rapid but uneven modernization flung criticisms and attacks at the record of American psychiatry, including its earlier use of lobotomy, its view (held as recently as 1973) that homosexuality was a mental disorder, and its troubling history of hospitalizing those inclined to dissent.

We also should not forget that the American Psychiatric Association formally agreed in 1980—and continues to argue in DSM-IV—that symptoms of ‘Oppositional Defiant Disorder’ include being ‘negativistic,’ ‘unproductive,’ and ‘disobedient’ are used to silence dissidents..

“If you are Chinese,” Gabriel commented in the more-recent Times article “they send you to a psych ward for protesting against the CCP (Chinese Communist Party). If you are Tibetan, they send you straight to prison, generally following an electric cattle prod in your mouth, or they just execute you for ‘subversion.’ Alarming numbers of dissident Chinese do indeed regularly disappear.”

Let me quote from the New York Times article. "If China, one of our main trading partners, continues to treat its own dissenters in this way, with jailed Nobel Peace prize-winner Liu Xiaobo similarly rendered a political prisoner and China's own news services refusing to report news of his Nobel Prize, it indicates more than anything that China is not yet ready to assume the responsibility that comes with being a world leader. Before it can do so, it has to drop these Orwellian techniques and treat its political dissidents better. Surely that would include trying to heed their complaints rather than pathologizing and locking up those who dare to voice a contrary opinion." unquote