Political Psychiatry: How China Uses ‘Ankang’ Hospitals to Silence Dissent
The Wall Street Journal (19 April 2016) recently reported on how China’s Ministry of Public Security is using psychiatric involuntary commitment to remove dissidents from society and silence their protests.
“… human rights groups have long charged that one of the crudest examples of illegality in Chinese criminal procedure is the political use of psychiatry to detain, imprison, and forcibly medicate dissidents and activists. The use of this tactic, borrowed from the Soviet Union early in the Maoist era, was reduced after the Cultural Revolution, but revived in 1987 with the creation of psychiatric hospitals, administered by the police, called Ankang (‘peace and health’) institutions.”
CCHR also reported on this in 2014, when it said, “The Chinese government routinely uses psychiatric confinements as a tool to control dissidents.”
Even earlier in 2010 this was being reported.
Psychiatry and psychology have a long and troubling history of being used to suppress political dissidents — most recently with the CIA-sanctioned torture program. Despite consistent denials, the American Psychological Association had numerous contacts with CIA contract psychologists Drs. James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, including contacts related to illegal interrogation techniques. For example, the APA secretly coordinated with officials from the CIA, White House and the Department of Defense to create an APA ethics policy on national security interrogations which comported with then-classified legal guidance authorizing the CIA torture program.
Too often the “mental health” industry has shown its willingness to accommodate and collude to legitimatize government policy, including the torture and murder by the People’s Republic of China’s Falun Gong, the CIA’s 1950’s MKULTRA mind-control programs, and the Soviet Union’s incarceration of political dissidents in psychiatric hospitals and sentenced to labor camps, to name a few.
In 1955, a Soviet manual entitled Brainwashing: A Synthesis of the Russian Textbook on Psychopolitics was translated and distributed as a public warning by a New York professor. The manual was based on the methods of Ivan Pavlov, a Russian psychiatrist who developed “conditioned response” theories through experiments on dogs in the early 1900s. Pavlov’s work laid the groundwork for a fundamental psychiatric misconception that remains to this day: that, like dogs, men are basically programmable animals, influenced only by fear and reward. Pavlov’s experiments established the foundation for much of the inhuman brainwashing techniques used by the Soviet Union and China in the mid-twentieth century; and now used by the United States Central Intelligence Agency in their Detention and Interrogation Program.
PSYCHOPOLITICS—the art and science of asserting and maintaining dominion over the thoughts and loyalties of individuals, officers, bureaus, and masses, and the effecting of the conquest of enemy nations through “mental healing”. Download the Brainwashing manual here.