Guardians blamed for crimes by psychotic patients
China had nearly 4.3 million severely mentally ill patients on record as of the end of 2014, with more than 55 percent of them living in poverty, China's health authority announced Friday.
About 84 percent of patients only held a junior high school degree or lower, and 76 percent were between 18 and 59, Wang Bin, deputy director of the disease prevention and control division with the National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC), said at a press conference on Friday, one day ahead of the World Mental Health Day.
"Mental illness is both a major public health problem and a severe social problem in China," Wang said.
Meanwhile, China's health institutions are failing to cope with the growing number of severely mentally ill patients, said Wang.
The country currently has 1,650 professional mental health institutes, with over 20,000 psychiatrists and 228,000 beds, which equals to 1.5 psychiatrists for every 100,000 people, compared with an average of 2 per 100,000 people in middle and high-income countries. Two-thirds of counties in China have no psychiatric institute, according to the NHFPC.
The 2015-20 plan for national mental health work published in June said that the country would double the number of psychiatrists in five years.
Due to a lack of treatment and management of patients suffering from mental illness, China has seen a spate of fatal attacks by such patients in recent years.
A mentally ill man stabbed three family members to death in Central China's Hunan Province in late September, according to the Xinhua News Agency.
"Tragic incidents involving mentally ill patients cannot be eradicated completely even in developed countries, and what we can do is try to reduce its occurrence," Wang told the Global Times on Friday.
Mentally ill patients who endanger other's safety violate China's Criminal Law, and the Ministry of Public Security is urging all provinces and cities to build compulsory medical centers so that such patients could be forced into treatment, Xie Bin, director of Shanghai Mental Health Center, told the press conference.
An effective measure, according to Wang, is to also impose penalties on the guardians of such patients, and the related regulation is likely to be included in an amendment of China's Mental Health Law implemented in 2013, Wang said.
Li Fangmin, director of a judicial evaluation institute in Wenzhou, East China's Zhejiang Province, told the Legal Daily that the institute conducted 285 psychiatric assessments in the past two years, and in 60 percent of the cases, mental impaired patients committed crimes due to a lack of custodial overwatch from their guardians.
