Assertive Chinese Held in Mental Wards

[azurnoir]

Xu Lindong, a poor village farmer with close-cropped hair and a fourth-grade education, knew nothing but decades of backbreaking labor. Even at age 50, the rope of muscles on his arms bespoke a lifetime of hard plowing and harvesting in the fields of his native Henan Province.
But after four years locked up in Zhumadian Psychiatric Hospital, he was barely recognizable to his siblings. Emaciated, barefoot, clad in tattered striped pajamas, Mr. Xu spoke haltingly. His face was etched with exhaustion.
“I was so heartbroken when I saw him I cannot describe it,” said his elder brother, Xu Linfu, recalling his first visit there, in 2007. “My brother was a strong as a bull. Now he looked like a hospital patient.”
Xu Lindong’s confinement in a locked mental ward was all the more notable, his brother says, for one extraordinary fact: he was not the least bit deranged. Angered by a dispute over land, he had merely filed a series of complaints against the local government. 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.
He was finally released in April, after six and a half years in Zhumadian and a second mental institution. In an interview, he said he had endured 54 electric-shock treatments, was repeatedly roped to his bed and was routinely injected with drugs powerful enough to make him swoon. Fearing he would be left permanently disabled, he said, he attempted suicide three times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/12/world/asia/12psych.html

[old mark]

1. This is the old Soviet model of mental health - if you disagree with the

regime, of course you are wrong, and if you persist in being wrong despite "education", you are obviously mentally ill. The "treatment" usually consisted of electroshock, wrapping the "patient" tightly in sheets and soaking them in ice cold water, and injection of drugs that cause convulsions to the point of exhaustion. The good Doctors of the Soviet Union were in accord with this "political psychology" till the suddon end of the commiunist rule there, when they addopted standards used by most of the world.
I believe there are some "religious" nations and cultures that use their own versions of "psychology" to torture non-conformists as well.
Rec.
mark