82% of the 1,515 people who were accused of criminal offences and underwent psychiatric evaluation at a Beijing hospital from 1988 to 1996 suffered from mental illnesses (China Daily, 2nd June). Mental health has been a long ignored issue in China. A law that was expected to tackle the issue of mental illness was drafted in 1980 but never published. Legal protection is required for patients because currently police officers randomly send people they deem to be mentally ill to psychiatric hospitals for compulsory treatment. The recent spate of killings outside schools across China has prompted important research into the issue. More than 16 million Chinese people suffer from serious mental disorders and a majority of them have not received any medical aid. The Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Public Security have vowed to expand treatment for severe mental patients. A mental health screening program will be launched in China’s Hubei province, to improve service for 800,000 patients. (more…)
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An employee of high-tech firm, Foxconn died on 21 May after jumping from a building in the Southern manufacturing hub of Shenzhen, the tenth such suicide since the start of this year. The dead worker was identified as Nan Gang, a 21 year old from Hubei Province. All the suicide victims at this electronics component factory are migrant workers from outside the city aged between 18 and 24 years old. Stress and lack of social life seem to be the root cause of the suicides. Public outrage has been incurred by a report on Beijing television showing security guards in black uniforms beating workers in Foxconn’s Beijing plant in August last year. The Mayor of Tianjin arrived at the Foxconn factory to investigate on the day Nan Gang died. The factory owners have invited monks to the factory to try and ‘relieve the bad atmosphere’. (more…)
Nine children have been killed and forty eight injured by stab wounds in a spate of attacks in schools across China by depressed forty-something year old men. On April 29, 2010, a 47 year old unemployed man attacked twenty-eight students in a kindergarten in Jiangsu. On April 28, 2010, fifteen students were stabbed in a school in Leizhou. On April 12, 2010, a man hacked to death a second grader and an elderly woman in Guangxi the day before the man’s relatives were going to send him away for psychological treatment. On March 23, 2010, a man killed eight children in Fujian and on March 2, 2009 a man hacked two pre-schoolers to death with a knife in Guangdong.
Mental health in China was not something you talked about in polite company until after the Sichuan earthquake. The collective outpouring of grief at this time raised the need for a professional approach to countering bipolar disorders, depression and suicide. Today most people I know living in China admit to ‘losing it’ now and again; long working hours including weekends, leaving the support network of friends, family and familiar surroundings, cultural misunderstandings and the rapid pace of change makes many people fairly fraught in Beijing.
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