APA’s Committee on the Abuse of Psychiatry and Psychiatrists passed a resolution last month at APA’s annual meeting in Chicago recommending that the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) investigate the alleged wrongful detention of Falun Gong practitioners in psychiatric hospitals.

The resolution will be reviewed by the Council on Professional Values and Human Dignity at the fall component meetings, according to committee member Abraham Halpern, M.D.

The resolution is the latest step by APA members to draw attention to alleged psychiatric abuses of some Falun Gong practitioners. Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is described by practitioners as a meditative discipline that benefits the mind, body, and spirit. Falun Gong’s appeal has spread to numerous countries including the United States. Practitioners assert that it is not a religion or an organization.

The Chinese government, however, declared last July that Falun Gong is a religious cult and outlawed the practice. Since then, an estimated 35,000 Falun Gong practitioners were arrested, and 5,000 were sent to labor camps without trials, according to Erping Zhang, a Falun Gong spokesperson who testified in March before the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.

A 1999-2000 report on human rights violations compiled by Falun Gong practitioners documents more than 200 arrests, detentions in mental hospitals, and forced injections of harmful drugs.

Halpern commented to Psychiatric News that the Chinese government wants to discredit Falun Gong practitioners by labeling them as mentally ill and dangerous. He said that reporters for the New York Times in China have interviewed practitioners detained in psychiatric hospitals who confirmed the abuse of psychiatry.

Halpern also wrote WPA Secretary General Juan Mezzich, M.D., in February asking the WPA to investigate allegations of forced detentions of Falun Gong practitioners in psychiatric hospitals. Mezzich told Halpern last month that he had forwarded the letter to WPA’s executive committee for action.

Halpern also wrote to Allan Tasman, M.D., who was then APA president, and Jeffrey Geller, M.D., who was then chair of APA’s Council on International Affairs, suggesting they raise concerns about alleged mistreatment of Falun Gong practitioners at the second annual Sino-American meeting in Beijing in April china.html.

APA members and Falun Gong practitioners Sunny Lu, M.D., and Viviana Galli, M.D., also wrote to Tasman and Mezzich in February asking them to express concerns about their Chinese colleagues’ actions.

Galli and Lu attended the Sino-American meeting in Beijing and participated in an informal discussion with Chinese psychiatrists about alleged abuses of Falun Gong practitioners, as did Tasman, Geller, APA Trustee Herbert Peyser, M.D., and Jose de La Gandara, M.D., chair of APA’s Committee on the Abuse of Psychiatry and Psychiatrists.

Peyser later told Psychiatric News that a Chinese psychiatrist said that he treated only people who were ill and had nothing to do with Falun Gong as a political organization.

A Chinese psychiatrist working at one of the mental health hospitals that the group had visited in Beijing told Lu that she had evaluated one or two Falun Gong practitioners but discharged them after a few days if they were not mentally ill.

Falun Gong is derived from the practice of Qigong, which involves a respiratory exercise to relax body muscles, the concentration of the mind to one point, and the conscious control of visceral functions including breathing, according to the paper "Qigong Magic and Induced Mental Disorder" by Yang Desen, M.D., at the APA-CSP conference.

Yang, a Chinese psychiatrist, describes a "Qigong craze" in the last two decades involving 100 million followers, the majority of them peasants, workers, and retirees with a low level of education and science. "Some of them may express their passive rebellion to governmental social control measurements in illegal superstitious ritual gathering. However, their efforts have been repaid only by further mental enslavement in the trap designed by their adored Qigong masters," according to Yang’s paper.

He distinguishes between an induced hypnotic state with normal physiology and a Qigong-induced mental disorder with symptoms including obsessive and paranoid ideation and feelings of anxiety and depression, according to his paper.

Over 700 cases of Qigong-induced mental disorder have been reported in the Chinese professional literature in the last two decades, and most of the patients have responded well to psychotropic drugs, according to Yang’s paper.

Tasman, who was a moderator for the session on psychotherapies that included Yang’s paper, said in an interview, "Because there have been cases of psychotic reactions reported in Falun Gong practitioners, I think Chinese psychiatrists feel obliged to evaluate any individual brought to them."

Tasman contrasted the Falun Gong situation with the abuse of psychiatry in the former Soviet Union. "It was very clear that political dissidents without any mental illness were punished by the Soviet government for their views by being detained and forcibly medicated in psychiatric hospitals. Our Chinese colleagues say that is not happening in China."