Psychopaths locked in by a law (3)

Deep-rooted prejudice

Vice president Sun said that the problems the mental health profession was facing today were deeply rooted in prejudice. She said because of ignorance about mental health, too many Chinese were terrified or prejudiced when they encountered it.

One patient surnamed Hu, 66, told the Shanghai newspaper Youth Daily that her family had actively discriminated against her and offered a barrage of excuses, refusing to take her home from hospital though she was judged capable of being discharged.

Wang, the daughter of another patient now living at home, said that all her other relatives still treated her mother as if she was a patient even after her mother had been hospitalized for three years and had been discharged. The relatives would sometimes refer to her mother as "the deranged one," and it hurt Wang a lot when she heard them talk like this. She has to "imprison" her mother at home, she said, because her mother has lost many basic living skills.

According to the National Center for Mental Health under the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, there were more than 100 million people suffering mental illness in China in 2009 and it estimated there were more than 16 million suffering serious mental illnesses.

Tang Hongyu, an expert from the Peking University Institute of Mental Health, said two-thirds of all mental patients could return to school or work, or even start their own businesses if they continued taking their prescribed drugs. But in fact, less than a third of the country's psychiatric hospital patients return to society because businesses and organizations keep them on the outer.

Qiu would like to see the government and private organizations working together to solve the problem. "The health authorities, the civil affairs department, the courts and the education authorities should work together to ensure that patients' rights are protected. Patients should be helped getting back to study or work after they are discharged," he said.

However, there are only a few day-care centers or halfway houses where patients can go after they are discharged.

Although the Shanghai Disabled Persons' Federation has opened more than 200 day-care centers in subdistrict government offices capable of looking after recently-discharged psychiatric hospital patients, Sun said that some centers are actually not operating.

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