Need for a clinical framework
The Turkish strikes challenged some of the basic benchmarks that had been generally accepted up until 1991. Hunger strikes before the1990's were usually considered as falling into one of two groups. The first group was that of the "serious" or "genuine" hunger strikers – meaning those who, as the Irish Hunger Strikers who died in 1981 had done, were fasting totally and taking only mineral water. This group was considered different from that of other hunger strikers, deemed (before the nineties) as "less serious" or "sham" hunger strikes – meaning those prisoners who were considered to be "cheating", by taking some form of nourishment "on the sly", during what they declared was a "hunger strike".
There were reasons for such a dichotomy. As explained in the previous lessons, many or most so-called "hunger strikers" do not, in fact, fast for any great length of time, and often take some form of nourishment in a clandestine way, or even openly. They insist, however, they are really "fasting". Most often, these prisoners who declare themselves to be "on hunger strike" have no intention of hurting themselves. This has been discussed in the previous lessons.
In other cases, and this has been documented in many countries, prisoners who more or less genuinely wanted to protest by fasting, do, however, "eat on the side" keeping for example a stock of biscuits under the mattress, or getting food brought to their cells clandestinely by fellow prisoners or through family visits. In some cases, very exotic ways of "hunger striking while not losing weight" have been discovered… One prisoner, known to the author, supposedly took only tea, but after two and a half weeks, had lost practically no weight… It was found that his thermos contained not tea, but spaghetti and tomato sauce which his wife brought to him in secret every other day…
Thus the general notion of "serious" versus "sham" hunger strikers was a sort of "common knowledge" amongst medical staff dealing with hunger strikes in prisons.