Troublemakers: Drugged, framed and detained

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 2 February 2025

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

BBC Eye investigates police abuse of psychiatric detention in China. In 2012, China introduced a law to curb the widespread abuse of psychiatric hospitals by the authorities, but it hasn’t worked. We reveal how the police found ways to circumvent the law, allowing them to punish protesters without going through the criminal justice system. With almost no checks and balances, the number of people being illegally sent to psychiatric hospitals is said to be surging. Testimonies from protestors, detained for months in secure psychiatric wards reveal how they were restrained, forcibly treated with psychoactive drugs and even subjected to electric shock therapy. Their crime? “Picking quarrels and troublemaking” the catch all offence police use against anyone threatening to disturb “social harmony”.

Transcript

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0:00.0	One summer day in 2024, I was contacted by a man who I'd only briefly met in Shanghai.
0:08.1	Hello, do you have the contact information of reporters outside of China? I need it urgently. Thank you.
0:16.2	To protect his identity, I'm going to call him Kay. Kay told me he'd been arrested by the police,
0:23.3	locked up and tortured in a psychiatric unit for openly criticizing China's COVID rules.
0:29.2	I spoke out during the pandemic. I said the COVID policy violated our rights and made it
0:36.8	difficult to see a doctor or get food.
0:40.3	The police arrested me for this. They sent me to a psychiatric hospital to be tortured.
0:47.7	They said I had mental problems and locked me up.
0:52.3	Having spent most of my 20s in Shanghai,
0:55.2	I knew all about China's strict censorship
0:57.9	against anything politically sensitive.
1:01.1	But I'd never heard about people being forced
1:03.8	into psychiatric units
1:05.2	where they were subjected to mind-bending treatment
1:08.2	just for protesting.
1:12.1	Kay and I spoke every day for a month.
1:17.2	Then, all of a sudden, Kay went offline, silent.
1:22.3	I was really worried, and I felt I owed it to him to investigate what's happening to protesters in China.
1:30.2	I'm Nima Pratton. I've spent months working with journalists to expose a story that China is trying to hide.
1:39.4	This is troublemakers, drugged, framed and detained.
1:44.3	A BBCI investigation for the documentary from the BBC World Service.
1:54.4	In the short video, we can see a young man wearing glasses, holding up his phone on speaker mode, talking with the police.
	...

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