My Experience in a Mental Institution

My name is Sun Xiangshu. I am a female Falun Dafa practitioner without any family history of mental problems. I have had good health since I was a little girl, and I never had to take a single pill of medication since I started practicing Falun Gong three years ago. I began my cultivation path in the beginning of 1998. I was a teacher working for the Yantai Young People's Association (the YYPA - translator) in Shandong Province, and during the crackdown I was forced to quit my job because I practiced Falun Gong. Qu Fongjia was the person in charge of persecuting Falun Gong practitioners in the YYPA. They slandered Falun Gong, and have tried hard to prevent my boyfriend, Sun Minghou, and I from practicing Falun Gong. On February 15, 2000, in order to prevent us from going to Beijing to appeal to the central government, Qu and others illegally detained us. We protested their illegal detention with a hunger strike. They then forced our parents to advise us to give up. They said they would only release us if we wrote a statement to promise not to appeal again. We refused their requests sternly. On February 19, under the direction of Liu Shuguan, the secretary of the Yantai Communist Youth League (the direct superior of the YYPA), my boyfriend and I were escorted to the Yantai Mental Hospital. The people who sent us there were Wang Yangning, the vice director of the YYPA, a policeman named Wang Yong, and my father (under pressure). After being sent to the hospital, I was put into the second treatment unit. It was an area that consisted of a series of dirty and ugly one-story buildings, where mice were often seen running around. The unit could accommodate about 70 or 80 patients. The hospital usually asked the patients' families to sign a statement that later could serve as an excuse for their brutal or even violent treatment. As a result, patients lived with threats almost everyday. Nurses yelled at the patients all the time, and gave rude orders like "Eat your meal, otherwise we will do forced feeding (inserting tubes from one's noses to transfer food)," or "Tie him up," which could be heard all day long. Five other Falun Gong practitioners were already in the hospital when I was sent there. It was also said that a few other practitioners finally wrote "repentance statements" allowing them to leave the hospital after 50 days of being force-feed drugs. On the first day there, Dr. Jiang (male), director of the unit, and Dr. Sun (female), had a conversation with me. I talked to them about why Falun Gong practitioners kept on appealing to Beijing, and I also told them that it is illegal to persecute Falun Gong practitioners. Sun said, "We know that you are all normal people, but please try not to be stubborn." I said, "We have the right to appeal, and hospitals do not have the right to stop us. If a hospital is forced to detain healthy people, its function has been abused and it has become a political tool." I refused any medication there and the chief nurse, together with a few other nurses, tried to feed me drugs by force. They pressed me to my bed, and tried to feed me the medication with lots of water. I resisted and they were unsuccessful. All the practitioners in the hospital refused those medication and injections, and we tried to do everything according to the Fa. We used our compassion when being attacked by hospital employees or other patients. We did all the cleaning work of the hospital and helped to take care of other patients. We made the previously dirty environment clean and neat. The unit achieved a full score in the hospital's annual sanitary inspection. It was the only full score in the whole history of the second unit. Everybody, including employees and patients, were grateful for our work. After a routine body test, Dr. Sun told me all of my test results came back normal. During the electrocardiogram test, the doctor asked me, "Do you practice Falun Gong?" It was clear to him there wouldn't be a patient with such a clear and intelligent mind in a mental institution. Under the effort of all the Falun Dafa practitioners there, doctors and nurses gradually understood that we were all healthy and nice people. Several nurses even became interested in listening to us recite the Teacher's article. They stopped forcing us to take medicines and injections, and stopped interfering with our exercises. Only the chief nurse yelled at us, "Don't help do any work, just cooperate with the therapy plan!" We ignored her request, and treated her with compassion. I met a total of 12 Dafa practitioners there. Mrs. Wang (a practitioner) was fed with a large amount of drugs everyday, which made her very weak and motionless. Five practitioners from Laiyang, Shandong Province, named Li Li, Jiang Jiao, Zhangying, Li Ying, and Wang Shiling, were sent there by their local township government just because they cultivated Falun Dafa with determination, and the local officials were very afraid that they would go to Beijing to appeal. Another 3 practitioners from Laiyang were Jiang Shuling, Teng Cuijie, and Jiang Shuping. The local government and police sent them there because they went to Beijing to appeal. The police did not remove Jiang Shuling's handcuffs until they reached the ward, just to prevent her from fleeing. Practitioner Song Hui was from Zizhong District, Yantai, Shangdong Province. He was kept there because he held a 14-day hunger strike to protest during the illegal detention. Another female practitioner from Zizhong District, Sun Yuhua, wrote a letter to the central leadership of the Party to appeal for her husband, who was illegally fired from his job. As a consequence, the police sent her there. Police sent Ning Shuzhi, a female practitioner from the Yantai Xinhua Bookstore, there only because she wanted to practice Falun Dafa. During the detention, Wang Yanting and Liu Lumin from the YYPA dropped by to visit me (They went there to take my boyfriend back, who was severely tortured and dying). They said that they could get me out if I guaranteed not to appeal any more. But I refused sternly. Mr. Jiang, a medical director of the hospital, said that they were under strong pressure from the city government. Whoever was sent there must receive treatment until they quit practicing Falun Gong. We refused their treatment, so they gave us injections by force. Seven or eight people tried to pull me onto a bed. I refused and said, "What you are doing is inhuman, you must be responsible for whatever you do." When reaching the edge of the bed, I tried to hold it with my two legs. They tried hard to pull me without paying any attention to my safety. The bed was almost turned up side down. Watching this, a patient cried and shouted, "Don't tie her up, she is a nice person!" The chief nurse shouted at her, "Shut up, otherwise we will tie you up too!" "So do it!" the patient responded. Finally they used five strips of cloth to tie me to the bed. They gave me an injection and feed me drugs. I felt very weak after their treatment, and my throat and mouth felt very dry. Four other practitioners were also tied up in bed. I was injected with eight bottles of drugs during the five days when I was tied in bed. But I recited Teacher's articles everyday. Finally they released me under our constant requests. Mr. Jiang found that we refused to cooperate, and he also had no other reason for further detention. Then Mr. Jiang began to request more checkups so that he could distort the test results and have a reason to keep us there. He said that I had a heart problem and needed more tests, but I refused. One day, a male doctor and a nurse wanted to conduct a blood test. I struggled and they did not succeed. Afterwards, they tied me up for another five days. The hospital refused to discharge us even under our constant requests. Finally we began a hunger strike. Mr. Jiang said to us, "You want a hunger strike here? If you agree not to go to Beijing to appeal again, I can discharge you?But I still need the agreement from your employer." We insisted that we would continue the hunger strike as long as the mental hospital still kept mentally healthy people. Under our pressure, practitioner Song Hui was soon released. Then practitioner Zhang Yun and Jing Shuling were transferred to other wards. Other practitioners were subjected to forced feeding. During the hunger strike, Mr. Jiang threatened me many times, "It is meaningless for you to be on a hunger strike. We will not release you if your employer does not come to get you out. We have a lot of advanced equipment here, like a kind of electric bed that can immediately shock you when you lose consciousness." But I was not scared by what he said. On the third day, my parents came. Knowing the situation, they strongly asked the hospital to discharge me. When I was sent to the hospital, both the YYPA and my father signed (under pressure) the document. So the hospital insisted that the YYPA must agree to sign me out. Qu Fengjia (an official of the YYPA) tried to delay signing me out even though she agreed to. Then my parents moved into the hospital to watch out for my safety. After three days, the vice director of the YYPA Wang Yanning came to the hospital and said to me, "You must first write a pledge not to appeal again. Otherwise you will stay here forever." I refused, and he said, "Then you must stay here." I said to him that I would continue the hunger strike. Then I went back to my room. On the second day, my mother orally agreed to them that I would not appeal, then they released me. Two other practitioners, Jiang Shuping and Teng Cuijie were still in detention when I left. Later the YYPA said that we owed them money even though they had already deducted several months of my salary. I told them that I took fame and money lightly and I would not argue with them about the money they deducted. But what they did was illegal and I could not agree with it. They knew they were wrong and had nothing more to say about it. March 27, 2001