Mental health gets a boost

• Source: Global Times
• [02:21 June 22 2010]
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By Deng Jingyin

The government plans to expand and renovate 550 mental health facilities across the country to improve mental health services and prevent the risk of violence from patients.

Yin Li, vice minister of the Ministry of Health, revealed the plan at a national conference, which was held in Chengdu, Southwest China's Sichuan Province last week, according to the Xinhua News Agency.

Community health centers in cities and clinics in rural areas were ordered to make a list of people with severe mental health problems and offer them counseling on a regular basis. Local authorities were ordered to open telephone hotlines and offer counseling services.

Local health authorities have documented 900,000 serious cases and 24 cities have launched hotlines, Yin said.

Yin said that the recently unveiled medical reform policy stressed the importance of managing psychiatric patients with serious conditions. About 45,000 high-risk but poor patients received free outpatient treatment and 7,000 received free hospitalization.

The problem triggered concern after a string of attacks involving mental health patients.

One patient with a knife tried to stab people randomly in North China's Heilongjiang Province last Tuesday. Police stopped him before he injured anyone.

Also in Heilongjiang, a man with a mental disorder killed his 13-year-old daughter and her 12-year-old classmate last month using a pair of scissors.

Some 82 percent of 1,515 people accused of criminal acts reportedly suffered from a mental problem, according to psychiatric evaluations done at Beijing Anding Hospital from 1984 to 1996.

Over 94 percent of the offenses included assault and battery, vandalism and disrupting social order, the report said.

Meanwhile, the number of people with mental health problems is alarming.

About 100 million people in China have mental health problems, among them more than 16 million people suffer from serious mental disorders, according to the statistics released by China Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 2009.

The official attributed the problem to multiple factors including industrialization, urbanization, a faster pace of life and other modern day stresses.

Beijing Daxing Psychiatric Hospital, which has about 800 patients, has registered more patients in recent years, especially teenagers.

"In the past four years, the number has jumped by 10 percent a year, and the number continues to climb. Most pa-tients are young people below 20, but we don't know the exact reason for this trend," a hospital official surnamed Bian told the Global Times Monday.