Ireland: Speech by Psychiatrist Declan Lyons on the Persecution of Falun Gong Practitioners

Thank you for this opportunity to come and speak with you today. I am speaking above all in a personal capacity but also as a practising psychiatrist working at St. Patrick’s’ Hospital here in Dublin. The relevance of my professional credentials will become clearer shortly, as I will highlight how people in China are being drugged into submission for simply expressing their religious, political or any other views that the Chinese state takes issue with. I’m not speaking as a Falun Gong practitioner but I have been a member of “Friends of Falun Gong” and have been struck by the absolute sincerity and conviction of the Falun Gong practitioners I have met. In terms of the history of modern medicine, there is little doubt that my profession of psychiatry has come a long way while some would perhaps correctly argue that it still has a long way to go.

Mental illness is one of the greatest causes of human suffering in the world today. No one professional grouping has a monopoly on all the skills necessary to help people understand and come to terms with mental distress. Modern psychiatric practice needs to work collaboratively with other disciplines such as psychology, social work and occupational therapy to even attempt to deal with the needs, disadvantages and stigma faced by sufferers of mental illness. Simply classifying people into diagnostic categories is inadequate and most psychiatrists aren’t bigots – we do recognise the pitfalls and limitations of this. This is particularly important because in psychiatric practice we sometimes come into contact with people who are complained about, or people who don’t wish to voluntarily receive treatment for behaviours or beliefs that are deemed by others to be outside the norm for society. As a result of this we try to take on board social and cultural factors that influence the expression of mental illness. We try hard to make diagnoses only in accordance with internationally agreed criteria and norms. We subject our practice to outside scrutiny – so that from next year when new mental health legislation comes into effect in Ireland, psychiatric doctors will be one of the most heavily regulated medical specialist groupings. This is being done for good reason, as the potential exists for psychiatry to be exploited to reinforce not only social norms but also even political interests.

There is a sinister precedent for this and it comes from the era of the former Soviet Union. It is widely known how in the 1970s and 1980s political dissidents were “diagnosed” with sinister syndromes such as “paranoid delusions of reforming society” and “hippieism” and were incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals and forced to take anti-psychotic medication. Thankfully such diagnostic distortions never received international credibility and Soviet psychiatry was forced to reform as a result of outside pressure and under threat of expulsion from world professional bodies.

What is happening today in China, however, is the blatant misuse of psychiatry to act as a direct agent of social control and to be a tool of that states’ suppression of Falun Gong. Since the start of the persecution 4 years ago, a steady stream of practitioners have been labelled as mentally ill and been detained involuntarily in state forensic psychiatric hospitals. China learned well from its Soviet cousins and the misdiagnosis of democrats and political activists as psychiatric patients has peaked and troughed over the years according to events as far back as the massacre of the 1966 Cultural Revolution, or more recently the events in Tiananmen Square. Chinese government reports admit a recent increase in admissions of so-called political cases to institutions like the Beijing University of Medical Science. We know of between 1500-2000 such admissions of Falun Gong practitioners where families have refuted the presence of any mental illness.

The treatment administered seems to follow a pattern consisting of forced administration of anti-psychotic medications in injectable form, the use of physical restraints and the meting out of electro –convulsive therapy in a singularly cruel fashion reminiscent of forced medical experiments in Nazi concentration camps.

If anti-psychotic drugs are administered outside of genuine clinical indication, side effects can be severe – these can include severe and painful muscle spasm, bone marrow suppression, liver damage and even death and there have been fatalities among Falun Gong practitioners.

Quite simply this perversion of psychiatric practice is torture dressed up as science. To justify this, some Chinese psychiatrists have invented diagnoses like ‘document crazies’ or dysphrenia or qigong induced psychosis which have no international validity or recognition. Why is China currently employing psychiatric abuse against Falun Gong practitioners? Apart from the fact that this is their only way of dealing with dissent I believe the Chinese state deliberately hopes to discredit Falun Gong by labelling a proportion of its membership as mentally ill. It is no coincidence that prominent Falun Gong practitioners have been singled out for this abuse.

Such abuses of psychiatric practice thrive in an atmosphere of fear and silence where mental health has low status and priority. We have already seen, however, the damage done to public confidence in psychiatry as a whole during the era of Soviet abuse. Silence thus is not an option and I am pleased to tell you that bodies such as the Royal College of Psychiatrists representing also the Irish College, and the World Psychiatric Association have condemned all such abuses and plan to send an inspection delegation to gain unimpeded access to Chinese Psychiatric hospitals and named Falun Gong practitioners detained there against their will. We need to cultivate an ethos of caring and sensitivity in treating patients with mental illness in all societies. To do this China needs first to change its horrifying distortion of psychiatric practice and protect the rights of its citizens to exercise religious, political or other freedoms without fear of psychiatric labelling or incarceration. We are told that China is changing rapidly, modernising, developing. To those of us who witness this abuse, however, it seems that the more it changes the more it remains the same.

We have seen an example recently in Ireland of how people with physical and mental disability have striven during the Special Olympics to reach their full potential. This event was about inclusiveness, diversity and was touching, remarkable and wonderful to behold. What sort of Games will China conduct towards the end of this decade when the Olympic torch arrives in Beijing? Will Jiang Zemin’s successor be like Hitler in 1936 – gloating, flexing, intolerant, narrow-minded, nationalistic muscle?

We here in Ireland must tell them about the example we have set, we must strive to further promote inclusion for people with mental illness and mental disability.