Professor Zhou Dongfeng, President of the Chinese Society of Psychiatry, said in a speech on World Mental Health Day, that for Chinese Medical Association, at least 100 million people in China are suffering from various mental disorders, making mental illness the most common type of illness in China.
According to a report on October 3, 2006, carried by China News, Professor Zhou Dongfeng, President of Chinese Society of Psychiatry for Chinese Medical Association, delivered a speech in a seminar associated with World Mental Health Day in Beijing on Oct. 2, 2006. In his speech, Zhou said at least 100 million people in China are suffering from various forms of mental illness. Quoting numbers estimated by an epidemiological survey conducted in some areas of China, Zhou added that victims of mental disorders account for one fifth of the total patients in China; thus mental disorders rank first among all diseases.
When interviewed by The Epoch Times, Dr. Yang Jingduan, a psychiatrist specializing in psychological and behavioral medicine, said a multi-layered comprehensive treatment is needed to improve the mental health situation in China. On the level of social culture, the undesirable habits of apathy, jealousy, and interpersonal struggle embedded in the Party Culture must be discarded. Traditional Chinese virtue should be promoted to create an honest, tolerant, and mutually caring society.
On the level of professional management, education in medical ethics and training in professional norms must be reinforced for medical and health care professionals. In particular, the interference and abuse imposed by the political party or government on psychiatric therapeutics must be eliminated.
On the level of social politics, the general public should be rid of fear about the autocratic regime, and pursue freedom of belief and freedom of speech, so social morals and justice can be rehabilitated.
Dr. Yang Jingduan is an attending physician at the Jefferson-Myrna Brind Center for Integrative Medicine, Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia. He is also the chief editor for the China Mental Health Watch (CMHW) website.
The following is an excerpt from his interview.
The Actual Number Is Much Higher
One hundred million is a very conservative figure, Dr. Yang told the interviewer. The actual number is much higher.
Mental disorders can be classified into two categories. The first category consists of the disorders such as schizophrenia and bipolar affective disorder, which originate from biological factors.
The second category is considered to be associated with the social environment and psychological development. Such mental diseases include personality disorders, anxiety disorders, depression, phobia, post-traumatic stress disorder syndrome, ill-adaptation complications, alcoholism, and drug abuse.
The incidence rate for category-one disorders is essentially a constant. It is seldom affected by the social environment. For instance, the incidence rate of schizophrenia is approximately one percent of the population.
In contrast, a lot of people suffer from category-two disorders, and the number of victims has kept increasing in recent years.
Take depression as an example: depression affects about 15 percent of the general population. Women are more likely than men to experience a major depressive episode. Twenty-five percent of women suffer from depression annually. As a result, category-two disorders cause a tremendous impact in society even though their symptoms are relatively mild.
Conservatively speaking, at least 30 percent of China’s population, or roughly 400 million people, suffer from mental diseases in various degrees and forms. Owing to the deficiency in developing psychiatric education, there are very few psychiatrists in China. Quite often, patients with mental illness are not diagnosed with mental disorders because average doctors have little experience in this field.
