(Minghui.org) Ms. Yu Mei, of Zhanjiang City, Guangdong Province, has been persecuted multiple times and spent at least ten years in prisons and brainwashing centers for upholding her faith in Falun Gong, a spiritual discipline that has been persecuted by the Chinese communist regime since 1999. While she survived the torture in custody, her husband passed away on July 14, 2006, after he fell ill from worrying about her.
Ms. Yu was arrested again on August 31, 2016 for distributing informational materials about Falun Gong. She was sentenced to four years and taken to the Guangdong Province Women’s Prison on May 18, 2018.
As a result of the torture in prison, her hair turned grey; three of her front teeth were knocked out; she was forced to take unknown drugs prior to her release; she then started suffering from extreme headaches; she had chills and fevers; she felt itchy all over her body; and she was feeling nauseous and irritable.
The following is Ms. Yu’s own account of what she and other imprisoned practitioners experienced in the prison.
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I was taken to Guangdong Province Women’s Prison in 2018. In addition to the physical torture, I was given unknown drugs against my will. If any inmate became sick, they had to go through a lengthy process to get the approval for medicine. But if a Falun Gong sneezed or coughed, the guards would immediately order the inmates to drag them to the prison clinic, take their blood pressure and force feed them with unknown medicine.
Once I coughed, and a prison guard immediately said that I had a cold and ordered three inmates to hold me down and force fed me with a handful unknown drugs. Moments later, I began to feel extremely uncomfortable. I was dizzy and nauseous.
Then they blamed me for struggling during the force feeding and spilled the drug on my clothes. They stripped off my clothes and poured cold water onto my body. It was the winter and they were still shivering even wearing thick jackets.
Some imprisoned practitioners have been repeatedly persecuted in the past. It felt to me that the guards knew everything about each of them, including what ailments they had before practicing Falun Gong, their family and marriage situation, what their families did for a living, and even their family conflicts. Then the guards would use such information to make personalized plans to persecute each practitioner.
I saw many elderly practitioners becoming depressed and emaciated from long term persecution. Many of them were starved, deprived of sleep and subjected to intensive brainwashing. With the excuse of treating them, the guards forced them to take unknown drugs every day.
One practitioner I met in the prison, Chen Haixia, had an ectopic pregnancy before and almost died. After practicing Falun Gong, she has remained healthy in the past 24 years and she was really grateful for it. Because of sharing her story with people, she was arrested numerous times and tortured in the detention center, brainwashing center, labor camp and prison. No matter where she was or what torture she suffered, she never gave in and remained firm in practicing Falun Gong.
Such a nice person is now tortured in the Guangdong Province Women’s Prison. I saw that she was force-fed a large amount of unknown drugs every day, which has caused her to have dangerously high blood pressure and severe vaginal bleeding. She was haggard and emaciated. Yet the guards still starved her and didn’t allow her to sleep. Her family is now very worried about her.
Talking about my own situation. During my last month there, I felt my body was going through some strange changes. I had intermittent headaches. I tried to negate it. However, it still happened often. My brain nerves were tight. I felt foggy and absent-minded. My memory deteriorated.
During the first month after I was released from the prison, the episode started happening more frequently. After two to three months, it became worse. I had chills, fever and felt dizzy and itchy. I was feeling irritated and nauseous. There were a couple of times when I found grey and sticky things in my stool. I thought my life was ending.
At night, I could not sleep due to the extreme pain. I began to have hallucinations. The torture I had endured in the past few years played in front of my eyes and every second was so hard to bear. I felt my body was about to explode.
What I experienced made me think of some practitioners who died or became mentally disabled three to four months after they were released. It could be related to the unknown drugs they were forced to take in the prison. This happened to at least five practitioners that I knew. One of the practitioners who became severely mentally disordered often shouted “It’s toxic! It’s toxic!” When she suffered an episode, she would be very anxious. She pulled her hair and scratched her body all over.
A few days after I finally felt better, staff members from the city government came to visit me and asked how I felt. Why would these people care how I felt? I asked them why they asked. They said they were given orders to check on me.
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