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The Persecution of Falun Gong Practitioners in Tangshan Mental Hospital, Hebei Province

March 29, 2001

Last June and July, Labor Camp No. 1 of Hebei Province secretly sent practitioners Qiu Liying, Duan Jingjing, He Jing, and Zhao Shuying to the Tangshan Mental Hospital because they insisted on practicing Falun Dafa, refused to write repentance statements, and went on a hunger strike in the labor camp to resist their persecution.

The four of them were locked up with 40 patients who had severe psychiatric problems and were completely isolated from the outside. The practitioners' charts were marked "Obsessive Psychosis," despite the fact that they were normal, according to a series of mental examinations conducted upon admission.

Qiu Liying, female, age 37, a technician at Shijiazhuang Oil factory, was one of the people sent to the mental hospital. Despite having been on a hunger strike for three months and having a diastolic blood pressure of only 30, she was forced to receive anti-psychotic drugs. While making his medical rounds, a young male doctor said, "She hasn't been eating for three months, can she still take this drug?" It is obvious that this drug can damage the body. The next day, Qiu Liying's face swelled up and breathing was difficult for her. However, the director of her floor (he might be retired nowanother female director's last name is Xu) and her doctor, Doctor Bao, planned to destroy her mind quickly, so they insisted on giving her drugs illegally and electro-shocked her several times.

Zhao Shuying, female, age 50, resident of Sanhe, Langfang City, was also sent to the hospital. On her first day in the hospital, her hands and legs were tied to a bed, and several people held her down and stuck needles into her. Her blood was all over the sheets and the ground.

In the meantime, He Jing, female, age 23, a worker in Hua Liang Commercial Building in Tangshan, was tied down on another bed to receive fluid. The male director instructed the head nurse: "She refused to take the drugs! Fill her with double doses." As a result, He Jing could not get up the next day. Her face was gray, she was confused, she slept day and night, and she was unaware of her incontinence.

All of them had severe drug reactions and some were life threatening. After Duan Jingjing (female, age 24) was medicated, her tongue hung outside her mouth for as long as 12 hours, without being able to withdraw it. She had palpitations. Her face, mouth, and tongue turned purple. She had an explosive headache that made her roll back and forth on the bed and strike the wall. She later described those moments as "more unbearable than death."

They had explained to the director several times that they were normal people and refused to take the drugs. But the male director said that only his words counted inside the hospital and that they had to take the drugs. Or, he said, they could write repentance statements, eat, and be discharged. The head nurse reported to Zhang, the director of the Labor Camp Management Office, that they had a strong allergic reaction to the drugs. Zhang said, "It doesn't matter. Continue with the drugs." Zhang also went to the hospital many times to monitor the administration of the drugs.

In order to resist this evil persecution, the practitioners risked their lives by refusing to take the drugs. During that same time, news arrived that a practitioner was abused to death in Shandong Mental Hospital. Tangshan hospital was afraid of the responsibility of causing someone's death and reluctantly stopped administering the drugs. (It did not inform the Labor Camp, since the director wanted to get a reward [for the hospital's actions against practitioners] and the hospital did not want to lose that income.)

I do not know what drugs the hospital used. They were blue, yellow, and white and were given in large doses. These drugs have very strong numbing and suppressive effects on the central nervous system. They also have severe side effects on the brain and heart. It is very common for them to induce allergic reactions, so anti-allergic drugs are often administered simultaneously in the hospital. A nurse there had said, "There is no good way to treat psychotic patients now. The mainstay of treatment is using drugs to destroy and suppress their nerves to make their reactions become slow." Therefore, after administration of the drugs was stopped, the psychotic patients became so excited that it was difficult for them to be in control and they went without sleep for several days. (The psychotic patients did have a state of consciousness, though. They said that if one were to always take these drugs, a non-psychotic might become a psychotic. Therefore, even they did not want to take these drugs and covertly threw them away.)

Earlier, when the practitioners had just arrived at Tangshan Mental Hospital, they had nothing except the clothes on their bodies. It was during the hottest part of summer, and they requested many times to have their changes of clothes sent from the Labor Camp, but failed to receive them. After living more than a year in the hell-like Labor Camp and the live-coffin-like Mental Hospital, the young girls' clean and tidy appearances were long gone and only their emaciated faces remained.

The Labor Camp sealed out all information from the outside and did not allow visitations. On her sixth day in the Labor Camp, Zhao Shuying was sent to the mental hospital. During the two months that she was hospitalized, her family members went twice to Kaiping Labor Camp in Tangshan, travelling from Langfang (several hundred miles by taxi). They were cheated into going back home. No one at the camp said a word to them about the mental hospital (according to the country's policy, the family must agree before someone is sent to a mental hospital or receives anti-psychotic drugs). The mental hospital is isolated from the world and filled with psychiatric patients. For a normal person, that environment itself is already mental torture.

The mental hospital acted irresponsibly in order to make money. When the practitioners were on hunger strikes in the hospital, the head nurse left feeding tubes in their stomachs for a week. The rubber tubes became enlarged inside their stomachs and esophaguses. Their throats swelled and were nearly blocked by phlegm. Duan Jingjing has a narrow nasal passage and could not sleep with the pain. Another time, the head nurse brought some new tubes coated with a white powder. Without any disinfection process, she put the tubes down their noses. The new rubber stung their nasal passages and made He Jing burst into tears and nasal mucus. The tube was not taken out until she developed a headache and palpitations.

Once, Zhao Shuying did not receive force-feeding for 7 days. At that time, she had been on a hunger strike for a very long time. Amidst the very hot weather, and without eating or drinking, had she not been a practitioner, she would not have been able to last. Then she received the feeding tube once every two days and the tubes were kept in for one and a half days.

Before these practitioners were sent to this hospital, several other practitioners had been sent there by their work units or by detention centers. One practitioner was sent to this mental hospital by her work unit in June 2000. She received drugs and injections that made her delirious. She was given electric shocks for refusing to take the drugs, which made her nervous and lose consciousness many times. She cried loudly after waking up and begged her husband to take her home. The hospital then said that whoever paid the bill and sent her there had the right to take her. Her husband could not do anything. Her work unit then tried to force her to give up her practice and said that as soon as she gave up her practice, they would say that she was a normal person and could be discharged. Had she said she wanted to continue to practice, she would have been considered to have Obsessive Psychosis and would have had to stay hospitalized and receive drugs, injections, and electric shocks. She could not bear this mental torture and had no choice but to leave in tears with her employer.

This hospital often utilized drugs and electric shocks. For example, if one could not go to sleep by the set time, he or she would receive an injection. One practitioner often received electric shocks. After the shocks, her hands and feet began to tremble and she became very nervous with fear. The male director once yelled in the hallway, "Give her the highest voltage, shock her." When we first refused to take the drugs, they tried to hide the smashed drugs in milk so they could administer them to us secretly. They could not succeed, and after a long time, finally gave up.

The drugs the hospital used were extremely potent. Had we listened to them, how long could we have lasted? The days and nights of fluid injections made us become confused, on top of the hunger strike. Later, the nurses there got to know us better and realized that we are good people. Some of them even listened to us tell them about Dafa.

This is basically everything. I can't recall anything more.

A Dafa practitioner in China