Author: Elisabeth Rosenthal
Publication: The New York Times
Date: February 16, 2002
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.
Although 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, there is little
evidence to suggest that the Chinese government routinely uses psychiatric
hospitals to imprison political dissidents, as was common in the Soviet
Union.
But far more common are cases in
which 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 behavior 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's problems began in 1998
when local officials redistributed farmland in the village of Baoyou, claiming
some of the best land for themselves, villagers said. Ms. Huang was informed
that a portion of her best cornfield now belonged to someone else.
Five villagers, including Ms. Huang,
made a trip to the Suileng County petitions and appeals office to complain,
prompting an investigation and the subsequent dismissal of the village
head and the village Communist Party secretary. But the land problem was
not resolved.
So Ms. Huang continued to complain
to the office and sought out the county's party secretary. Impatient, she
then traveled 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 traveled 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 hospitalizations at the behest of county
officials and subsequent release by doctors.
She acknowledges that her protests
have become increasingly loud and extreme, a product of her frustration.
At one point, for example, she threatened
suicide, and she later decided to "take back the land" with a sit-in of
sorts, lying in protest on the disputed plot.
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.
That small psychiatric hospital
was not licensed to diagnose patients' ailments, only to treat those who
had already received a diagnosis. "A lot of her problems were political,"
the staff member said. "I had sympathy for her, though she is extremely
stubborn."
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, traveling to Ms.
Huang's distant village to interview neighbors.
"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.' "
