The arrest of a female student who undressed at the Islamic Azad University campus in Tehran has brought Iran’s strict dress code policies and controversial use of coercive psychiatric treatment back into the global spotlight.
Witnesses at the university filmed a young woman stripped down to her underwear walking around the campus on November 2 and shared the videos on social media. The posts went viral, with rights advocates in the West saying the student was protesting the mandatory dress code for women, which is enforced by the volunteer militia Basij, who act as morality police.
The Amir Kabir Newsletter, a student group active on Telegram, identified the female student as 30-year-old Ahoo Daryaei, who studies French at the university.
On November 10, Iranian activists staged a rally at the Trafalgar Square in London, U.K.
Iranian officials and media have denied that Daryaei protested the dress code, saying instead she had a mental health breakdown.
Iran’s state-aligned Tehran Times said the opposition groups used video of Daryaei for “political manipulation.” The news outlet said the reaction to her stripping down was an echo of a “pattern” that led to mass protests in Iran and abroad after a young woman, Mahsa Amini, died while in police custody after a violent arrest for violation of the dress code in September 2022.
The newspaper called Western reporting on Amini’s death and the protests that followed a “cognitive war and hybrid warfare against the Iranian nation.”
The Tehran Times depicted Daryaei as a recently divorced mother of two who is “grappling with significant emotional distress.” The report criticized opposition groups who “reframed” her story as a symbol of “defiance against the Iranian government” seeking “to amplify political tensions.”
“Rather than respecting her dignity and focusing on the mental health challenges she was facing, these groups saw an opportunity to fuel their anti-government agenda,” the newspaper reported.
That is misleading.
While independent experts have not assessed Daryaei’s mental state, her fellow students said the Basij had harassed Daryaei for weeks for an “improper hijab.” Sources close to her deny she was having a mental health crisis at the time of the incident.
Daryaei’s confrontation with the Basij over the dress code escalated on November 2, when Basij members tore her clothing, the Amir Kabir Newsletter reported. Daryaei then stripped to her undergarments, “possibly in protest,” the group said.
As witnesses filmed Daryaei walking outside the university in her underwear, plainclothes security officers confronted her and forced her into a car. A source told Amir Kabir the officers struck Daryaei’s head against the car during her detention, causing heavy bleeding.
She was later transported to a psychiatric hospital, which the Iranian Embassy in Paris described as a "specialized care center” on November 6.
Masih Alinejad, an Iranian-American journalist and women’s rights activist who hosts a video program for VOA Persian, communicated with “close associates of Daryaei,” who said that Daryaei was not suffering from mental health issues.
A close friend described Daryaei as a person who “defended her rights multiple times, both in school and university.”
Alinejad said, “an informed source” at the hospital also told her that “initial observations by the staff indicated Ahoo was mentally healthy.”
Thereafter, the source said, only security agency-affiliated doctors from outside the hospital were given access to Daryaei.
Britain’s Sky News also quoted unnamed sources saying that Daryaei does not suffer from any mental health issues.
Amnesty International said the reports that Daryaei had been "taken to an unnamed psychiatric hospital are alarming,” and, along with other rights groups, called for her release.
Amnesty said it had "previously documented how Iran's authorities equate defying compulsory veiling with 'mental disorders' that need ‘treatment'."
Iranian authorities have a track record of punitively using psychiatric treatment to quash dissent.
The Iranian government has previously admitted that it sent student protesters to “psychological institutes” during mass protests in 2022-23 following the death of Mahsa Amini. During those nationwide protests, which saw hundreds killed and nearly 20,000 arrested, protesters demanding more rights for women cut their hair and burned their hijabs in public.
Iran’s then-minister of education, Yousef Nouri, said some students were detained and sent to “psychological institutions” to “reform them,” CNN reported in October 2022, citing local media.
Judges in Iran diagnosed as mentally ill three actresses sentenced for not wearing hijabs in public, prompting a rebuke from leading psychiatry boards in the country.
Jailed Iranian dissident rapper Saman Yasin was also sent to a psychiatric center for his role in the Mahsa Amini protests.
A letter from a group of psychiatrists published in The Lancet medical journal strongly condemned Nouri’s admission that Iran was using “psychiatric and psychological services as a corrective measure in political conflicts” in a bid to pathologize “opinions and values that differ from that of a ruling regime.”
The Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, a United Kingdom based NGO, also condemned Iran’s systematic use of “involuntary psychiatric hospitalization” to “suppress dissent,” a practice it said had intensified in the wake of the Mahsa Amini protests.
Kianoosh Sanjeri, a journalist whom authorities also sent to a psychiatric hospital, told VOA’s Persian service that transferring political prisoners to psychiatric centers is a "repetition of the procedure of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.”