NYT: Sane Chinese Put in Asylum, Doctors Find

[DeepModem Mom]

Sane Chinese Put in Asylum, Doctors Find
By JOSEPH KAHN
Published: March 17, 2006


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 Thursday....

***

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 center 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 that 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 had lived in cells with psychotically disturbed inmates convicted of murder and was forced to swallow drugs to blunt his will. He also said the staff members had used electrified acupuncture needles to punish patients while other inmates were made to watch....


http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/17/international/asia/17china.html

[valerief]

1. Sure he wasn't in Bush's Gitmo?

[still_one]

2. NYTImes: Insane Americans put in charge of America

[hang a left]

3. I wonder if this has ever happened here in the US.

I do know that there are a few "mentally ill" labeled people who have made accusations against pols and celebrities. Or people who were so "distraught" they shot themselves in the head....twice.

I guess we don't do this here....yet. The people with enhanced pathological wills are either ruined in the public eye one way or another or are suicided.

[Trillo]

4. Meanwhile, in America

Doctors fail to see that a boy who's been beaten to death by several adult guards at a boot camp has died of injuries and instead rules the death is due to a blood disorder.

WTF's the difference between 'authories' here and there?