The Source of China’s Huge Mental Disorder Rate

A petitioner is detained by police outside the Chaoyang Hospital where where a group of people are protesting about medical and land grab issues in Beijing on May 8, 2012. (Mark Ralston/AFP/GettyImages)

The Chinese medical society revealed that more than 200 million Chinese citizens suffer from mental disorders, which amounts to 17.5 percent of the adult population.

There is a reason for this high statistic.

Petitioners revealed that Chinese authorities actually detain many sane people in psychiatric hospitals as a means of suppression and persecution. As a result, when medical experts conduct surveys using data from psychiatric institutions and related medical agencies, it looks like there is an unusually high number of people with mental disorders in China.

Chinese petitioners are a unique group of citizens seeking redress from higher authorities after becoming victims of injustice. However, instead of investigating and remedying such cases, the Chinese authorities treat petitioners as “factors causing social instability,” and try various ways to quell and silence them.

Wang Shuying, a petitioner from Central China’s Hubei Province, told New Tang Dynasty TV, a sister publication of The Epoch Times, that she too was held at a mental hospital but most in-patients she encountered there were sane, rational people.

“They offended either the government or a local official and many are petitioners. Some were held in the hospital for as long as eight years,” Wang revealed. “The hospital authorities are very skillful at concealing information because they are funded by the government. They receive 10,000 yuan ($1,413) every quarter for each in-patient. The hospital is always full.”

Wang also exposed that she was forced to take medicine, both pill form and injectable, at the hospital. “When I refused the drugs, the nurses tied me up with ropes and forcibly injected the drug, which kept me awake, unable to eat, and feeling agitated. It was so painful that many times I wanted to ram my head into the wall to commit suicide.”

Another petitioner, Ms. Xiao from Chongqing City, confirmed that psychiatric hospitals force petitioners to take medicine and give them injections.

“This is used to victimize and intimidate them. I know of at least two petitioners who were held in mental hospitals and were forced to take medication.”

It is reported that a huge number of Falun Gong practitioners are also detained in psychiatric hospitals. Some became disabled, and others were driven to insanity as a result of the psychiatric abuses they endured. The World Psychiatric Association (WPA) issued a statement in 2004 calling for the Chinese authorities to stop such practices immediately.

Public data from the Chinese medical society indicated that by the end of 2017, the number of Chinese with mental disorders was around 243,264,000. This is 17.5 percent of the population and is much higher than in other countries. Using the United States as a reference, 5 percent of U.S. adults (18 or older) experience a mental illness in any one year. In addition, among the Chinese statistics, serious patients requiring treatment exceeded 16 million, more than one percent of China’s adult population, which is also a significantly large number.