(Minghui.org) A 29-year-old resident of Qinzhou City, Guangxi Province became mentally ill and incapacitated after serving ten months in prison for her faith in Falun Gong, a mind-body practice that has been persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party since July 1999.

Ms. Chen Xuanru, a mother of two toddlers, was arrested on her way to work on August 23, 2023, by about six plainclothes officers from the Qinbei Branch of the Qinzhou City Police Department. They raided her rental place near the tea shop she worked at, and confiscated a bag containing two copies of Zhuan Falun, the main teaching of Falun Gong, some articles written by the founder of Falun Gong, and over a dozen copies of Minghui Weekly (a periodical containing Falun Gong information). The owner of the bag had entrusted Ms. Chen to safe keep it a few years prior.

Ms. Chen was later sentenced to ten months and fined 3,000 yuan for “subverting state power” and “using a cult organization to undermine law enforcement,” both are standard pretexts used by the communist regime to frame and imprison Falun Gong practitioners. She served time at the Lingshan County Detention Center (Lingshan County is under the administration of Qinzhou City).

When Ms. Chen’s family visited her at the detention center on April 11, 2024, they were saddened to see that her hair had been cut short, and her hands were cuffed. She had no response to what they said. They suspected that she had become mentally ill.

She appeared to be in much worse shape when her family returned on June 1 to visit her again. She was still handcuffed, and struggled to utter a word. Her mind was not clear and her behavior erratic. She kept chewing a black-ish candy type thing in her mouth. Her teeth were all black. More than one guard monitored the meeting.

On the day of Ms. Chen’s release, June 23, 2024, the detention center director and vice director helped her walk outside, and handed her over to her loved ones. Upon returning home, her family realized that she had become completely incapacitated, and was also suffering from an unknown mental illness. They wondered what had happened during her ten months of imprisonment that drove a once healthy young mother to mental illness. They called on kindhearted people to provide information about her persecution while in detention.