One in five adults in Shenzhen suffers from a mental illness, Chinanews reported yesterday, which was the 22nd World Mental Health Day. Moreover, 90% of sufferers in the city have never accepted treatment for their mental health problems.

According to Shenzhen Kangning Hospital in Luohu District, which is at the centre of the city’s mental illness prevention network, 21.19% of the city’s population suffers from some form of mental illness either mild or serious, and 1.41% of the city’s population (that is over 150,000 people) suffers from a serious mental illness.

Liu Tiebang, head of the hospital, said one of the problems with combating the problem was the mobility of the population. Moreover, the city is hugely limited in its resources. The national standard requires a city’s mental hospitals to have 1.71 beds for every 10,000 people, but Shenzhen has only 0.43, less than one quarter of what’s required.

One of the most common forms of mental illness in the city is depression, and homesickness has been cited as a major cause. Last time a citywide survey was carried out in 2005, it was found that 8.78% of women and 6.75% of men in the city suffer from mental illness. As with most of the world, the prevalence is higher among unmarried people than married people. It is also higher among unmarried people than married people and those with more than 13 years of formal education.

Depression is curable. Here is a list of possible ways to combat it from Britain’s NHS website.

In spite of all this, it is not just Shenzhen that is facing problems in its approach to mental health treatment. South China Morning Post reported yesterday that Zhengzhou, capital of Henan Province, required its subdistricts to report at least two cases of grave mental illness for every 1,000 residents.

The paper has more:

The law requires all full-service hospitals to set up psychiatric departments in an effort to make up for previous disregard for mental health services. The law also ended involuntary treatment of mentally ill patients.

The order to identify and register those with severe mental illness follows a national directive from the Ministry of Health from July last year, which stipulates the number of cases each province, city and county-level administration had to report or face administrative penalties.

Is Shenzhen being burdened by this quota system or is it simply moving faster? Either way, the stigma attached to those who are certified as mentally ill in China is hard for a Westerner to imagine.