Schizophrenia: the 'abandoned’ illness
- By Guo Yiming
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E-mail China.org.cn, April 19, 2015
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Chinese mental illness patients enjoy their free time under a doctor's supervision in a psychiatric hospital in Weifang, Shandong province. [Xinhua photo] |
Yongshou County, under China's northwestern city of Xianyang in Shaanxi Province, is a distant land on the vast loess plateau with huge hills and ravines that have left this poverty-stricken county "abandoned" by the outside world; most of the locals have never left their home village.
This "abandoned" land of 191,600 residents is also home to over 400 "abandoned" patients with mental disorders, among whom 259 are inflicted with serious schizophrenia, characterized by hallucinations and delusions, and there are often catastrophic stories of assaults and killings.
Two tragic cases that took place in the county caused major shockwaves among the public in 2013 when one patient beat a fellow villager to death and another killed his family and boiled them in a pot.
"They were members of the poor underclass without much education and only a healthy body before developing this psychiatric disease," Li Yumin, vice police commissioner of the county, told China Newsweek. "The untold solution to the problem is to lock them in a room with their arms and feet shackled by heavy chains or even transfer them to nearby counties if the family is too poor to feed them."
Poverty: cause and effect
People who live in rural areas suffer a higher prevalence of mental disorders than urban residents and the disease in turn adds to the misfortunes of those who are already living in poverty.
The World Health Organization (WHO) forecasts that China's economic burden from mental diseases, including spending on treatment and the costs of disease-induced criminal and civil cases, will account for a quarter of the overall public health spending by 2020.
"People living in poverty are the most vulnerable in the face of mental conditions," said Wang Zhenyi, a psychiatrist in the county's traditional Chinese medicine hospital. "Many young people dropped out of school and traveled to China's southern cities like Guangzhou and Shenzhen as migrant workers only to find themselves spiraling into the deep abyss of schizophrenia, which may be partly because they are unable to deal with the stress."
Lei Yu, once a gifted student and a good boy in the eyes of his peers, dropped out of school and headed for south China to make a living at the age of 15 but suddenly developed a mental disorder after less than two years for unknown reasons. The parents had no choice but to lock this 1.8-meter boy up in a small dark room with his hands shackled with heavy chains as he became more and more violent and uncontrollable.
"The past 10 years have been a long torturous journey for his parents who have lost hope and see their fate as worse than death," said Lei Zhenyong, Lei Yu's uncle. "This nightmare has left them psychologically scarred and economically strained as they can now barely afford vegetables for meals."
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