China accused of holding woman in mental hospital for challenging officials

Liao Meizhi one of many wrongly detained in psychiatric institutions for clashing with local bureaucrats, say researchers

 

Yang Chunguang holds the ID card of his wife Liao Meizhi, who is being held in the Yanshi mental hospital, Qianjiang city, Hubei. Photograph: Dan Chung for the Guardian

They snatched Liao Meizhi on her birthday, dragging her off the street and into a dirty blue van as others held back her husband.

It was only two months later, when a stranger knocked on the door, that her family learned where she had been taken. The man said he had just been discharged from a nearby mental hospital – and that Liao was being held there against her will. Her husband insists she has no psychiatric problems.

More than six months after she was seized, her family says she remains incarcerated in the nondescript building with thick steel doors just outside her hometown of Qianjiang, in China's central Hubei province.

Researchers believe she is among a growing number of people wrongly detained in psychiatric institutions after clashing with local officials. One activist has compiled a database of more than 500 such cases.

Some victims have been held for a decade. Those freed describe being forcibly treated – with electro-convulsive therapy and powerful anti-psychotic drugs – for health problems they never had.

"In the last few years you have been seeing more and more cases involving petitioners and whistle blowers – 'the awkward squad' – [often when] the authorities have tried other punishments or sanctions to make them stop and nothing else has worked," said Robin Munro, author of China's Psychiatric Inquisition and a research associate at SOAS law school. "Finally they really try to scare them to hell by putting them in mental hospitals."

Read more at The Guardian