Some heavy news for you today: Nine killed in school attack in China
There have been a string of murder rampages in the past couple of months, targeting schools and children, and using sharp knives like a kitchen cleaver. It’s similar to the Columbine shootings, but the perpetrator is always a middle-aged man. I see it as a symptom of society.
In June, a British medical journal published an analysis of mental health issues in four Chinese provinces and concluded that an estimated 91 percent of 173 million Chinese adults believed to be suffering mental problems never receive professional help.
Generally, repressive societies where freedom of expression is limited, mental problems are more prominent. Mental illness is extremely stigmatized in China.
Posted by Yang on June 27, 2010 at 4:30 pm
actually i don’t think mental problems are becoming more prominent because of repressiveness of the society. it seems like there are plenty of mentally unstable people in the US. i think it’s really because of a materialistic and unequal society that breed mental instability because people’s self-worth is becoming increasingly tied to how much money they can make. if people are not interested in material wealth, then their lives have no purpose. if you can’t achieve material wealth, then you are worthless. even if you can achieve it, you have no real friends, and people feel persistently lonely. china is very capitalist now and even more tacky about it than people in the US. their wealth inequality continues to grow. it is expected that the negative consequences will start to show up.
(mental instability is also related to how much stress a person is asked to handle. everyone has a mental breaking point. it seems to me that it’s very tied to self-worth. at mit a lot of people become unstable possibly because inability to perform academically directly undercuts one’s self-worth, which tends to be based on being proud of being smart)