After 47-year-old Hsueh Ai-min (
Ku Yu-jane (
"The media tend to portray people with mental illnesses as criminals, and reporters sometimes judge a suspect to be afflicted with a mental illness before they know it as a fact," Ku said.
"Sometimes the media reveals patients' identity against their will and creates an invisible barrier against the working, citizenship and marriage rights of the patients," Ku said.
The media is also quick to report that certain criminals have a mental illness.
She gave the example of Indonesian maid Winarshih, who killed her employer, presidential advisor Liu Hsia (
Ku urged the media not to exaggerate the violent crimes committed by people with mental illnesses, report more on the bright side and try to protect mentally handicapped people from unnecessary attention.
"The probability of people with mental illnesses [committing a violent crime] is as low as 5 out of 10,000," said Chang Min (
Chin Lin (
"The best example of the stigmatization of those with mental illnesses is their unwillingness to show themselves because they are afraid their appearance would cause problems for themselves and their families," Chin said.
"If one day we can talk about mental illness like we chat about high blood pressure, or we can tell our boss openly that we need days off to go to hospital to have our mental illness treated, then Taiwan would be a country really based on human rights," Chin said.
In the absence of those who had been cured, the association instead read out statements from people who are still suffering.
"It feels so helpless that the status quo cannot be changed. I am just sick in the head, but I do not hit or kill others. I am not like what the media describes as `a time bomb waiting to explode at any time,'" said one of them, named A-fang (
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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