YOKOHAMA, Japan - The world's leading psychiatric association has decided to look into reports that China is silencing political dissidents by confining them to mental wards, where some — including members of the Falun Gong sect — are drugged or undergo electric shocks.
The World Psychiatric Association voted Monday to send a fact-finding team to China, a move that could lead to Beijing's expulsion from the professional brotherhood if it resists the investigation as it has other similar missions in the past.
The group said that among those reportedly detained in mental hospitals are nearly 500 members of Falun Gong, a spiritual sect outlawed by China in 1999 for allegedly threatening national security. Thousands of its followers have been arrested and sent to labor camps.
"We are concerned they have Falun Gong members who are not patients in their hospitals," outgoing association president Juan J. Lopez-Ibor told the World Congress of Psychiatry, gathering Monday in the Tokyo suburb of Yokohama.
"I am concerned about the abuse of psychiatry," he said.
In some cases, individuals without mental problems allegedly have been forced to take psychiatric drugs and given electroshock treatment, sometimes as punishment for their political views, the association said citing reports from international nonprofit organizations and family members.
In one incident, Cao Maobin was held for 210 days at the Ranching No. 4 Psychiatric Hospital in eastern China after trying to form an illegal labor union, according to the New York-based China Labor Watch rights group. His wife claims doctors force-fed him drugs even though he was mentally sound.
U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson visited China last week and said the detention of Falun Gong members in psychiatric wards was an ongoing problem. She also said that U.N. officials have had difficulty getting permission to investigate the alleged abuses.
Chinese officials vehemently deny holding political opponents in mental institutions.
But part of China's effort to crush the Falun Gong group has been a propaganda campaign that often uses gruesome photos and accounts of how alleged members went insane and hurt themselves or others.
A multimedia show in Beijing last summer included graphic pictures of a farmer in southern Hainan province, Du Zhuanli, who allegedly developed psychosis after practicing Falun Gong meditation techniques and attacked a man with a farming tool. School groups were among those who filed by and looked at the display.
Similar charges of psychiatric abuse led the Soviet Union to withdraw from the World Psychiatric Association in 1983 as the other members prepared to expel them. Soviet psychiatrists were readmitted in 1989 after doctors there released hundreds of dissidents from confinement.
In its vote Monday, the association — which represents professional groups from 105 nations — said it wants to inspect China's hospitals by May after working out ground rules with Chinese authorities.
Lopez-Ibor said the team must have the right to inspect wherever, whoever and whenever it wants, but conceded that China has the final say.
"We don't have the possibility to visit all the hospitals one by one," he said. "We need some green light from the Chinese health authorities."
He was confident, however, that Chinese authorities would grant an open door.
"Our main intention is not to have some in the organization out," Lopez-Ibor said. "It is to finish the abuse."
Lopez-Ibor said he went to China in February to meet with the Chinese Deputy Minister of Health Xiaowei Ma and discuss the potential of investigating the claims.
China has been reluctant to open its doors for similar visits, including Robinson's attempts to send a U.N. team to probe reports of torture in prisons.
So far, China has refused to give into Robinson's top demands: that investigators choose the prisons and meet with detainees out of earshot from Chinese officials.
China would likely be hesitant to allow those freedoms to the psychiatric association's investigators. Without such unhindered access, an investigation might have little credibility.
Mike Shooter, president of the Britain-based Royal College of Psychiatrists, abstained from voting on the measure, saying it lacked teeth, although he admitted it was a step forward. He wanted his group to have better say in who is selected for the investigative team, an issue yet unresolved.
"We're asking they go further and faster," Shooter said.