A chill just went down my spine.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16082 The New York Review of Books February 27, 2003 Review
China's Psychiatric Terror By Jonathan Mirsky
Dangerous Minds: Political Psychiatry in China Today and Its Origins in the Mao Era by Robin Munro Human Rights Watch/Geneva Initiative on Psychiatry, 298 pp., $20.00 (paper)
1. At its triennial congress in Yokohama last September, the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) overwhelmingly voted to send a delegation to China to investigate charges that dissidents were being imprisoned and maltreated as "political maniacs" both in regular mental hospitals and in police-run psychiatric custodial institutions known as the Ankang. (The word literally means "Peace and Health.")
The WPA's vote was a direct result of Dangerous Minds, written for Human Rights Watch and the Geneva Initiative on Psychiatry by Robin Munro, and one of the most revealing books about China in many years. Many of the leading figures in the WPA acknowledge that Munro's ground-breaking research lies behind the association's negotiations with Chinese psychiatrists over the last year and its decision to send a delegation to China. What Mr. Munro's eloquent and convincing study reveals is that from the 1950s onward not only Chinese dissidents but people who submitted petitions to the authorities have been detained by the police, examined by psychiatrists, and found to be criminally insane—or, if found mentally "normal," designated as criminals to be cast into the prison system.
Once in China the members of the WPA delegation intend to visit several of the secret Ankang mental hospitals where dissidents are confined—they are in more than a dozen large cities— and to form their own professional judgments of the conditions of the inmates. It would be useful, although it is unlikely to happen, if the delegation were able to come face to face with some of the inmates described in Munro's book. [clip]