Psychiatrists on the side of the angels: the Falun Gong and Soviet Jewry.

The community of human rights activists has been deeply concerned about China’s harsh measures against the Falun Gong and has brought the matter to the attention of the United Nations. Since 1999, when the first reports of psychiatric abuse of Falun Gong practitioners began to reach the West, activists have turned to organized psychiatry to rally to their cause. To my knowledge, complaints have in fact been lodged with the American Psychiatric Association (APA), the World Psychiatric Association, and no doubt others. Criticisms of China’s psychiatrists include the accusation that they are behaving like the Soviet psychiatrists who were condemned by their Western colleagues back in the 1970s. Robin Munro is a leading figure in this effort. He has published a long paper entitled “Judicial Psychiatry in China and its Political Abuses.” Munro worked in Hong Kong for Human Rights Watch and since then has spent a great deal of time researching texts and documents dealing with what he confusingly describes as “forensic psychiatry” in China in the second half of the 20th century. This research on published material is the principal source of his evidence. One can sense his deep commitments to human rights on every page of his 120-page paper. Obviously, he is a man “on the side of the angels.” I shall discuss Munro’s paper in light of both my experience as a board member and president of the APA and my independent academic efforts. (This includes dealing with allegations against the Soviet Union, meetings with leading Soviet psychiatrists, examining a famous Soviet dissident, leading the APA’s investigation of alleged abuses in South Africa, and participating in the APA’s first official visit to China in 1981 that included a tour of psychiatric facilities and meetings with Chinese psychiatrists. In 1987, I was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for studies in international aspects of the political abuse of psychiatry.) It is worth noting that the most outrageous violations of human rights in the Soviet Union and China, including torture, summary execution, and forced labor camps, can go only so far in mobilizing world opinion. But add to such documented horrors reports of psychiatrists mistreating political dissidents, and people who have been relatively unconcerned are prepared to rally to the cause. This, I believe, says something about society’s profound ambivalence toward psychiatry in general and not just toward Soviet and Chinese practitioners. That ambivalence has been fueled by almost 40 years of “antipsychiatry,” which in its most radical form deemed any involuntary psychiatric treatment a violation of human rights and denied the reality of mental illness. Many critics of psychiatry conflate these general claims of abuse with more specific allegations of misuse of psychiatry for political purposes. Munro seems to have been influenced, not only by accounts of specific Soviet abuses but also by the conflated claims of the antipsychiatry movement; his paper echoes with that rhetoric. Unfortunately, he offers us no new evidence about the Falun Gong situation. Instead, in arguments about political misuse of psychiatry in China that are tendentious, confused, and unsubstantiated, he sets out the thesis that China in the post-Mao regime has adopted Soviet-style political abuse of psychiatry. Building on the case critics have made against the Soviet Union, he points the finger of blame at practitioners of “forensic psychiatry, a small and still seDr. Stone is the Touroff-Glueck Professor of Law and Psychiatry in the Faculty of Law and the Faculty of Medicine, Harvard Law School, Cambridge, MA. Address correspondence to: Alan A. Stone, MD, Harvard Law School, 1575 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138. E-mail: [email protected]