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Suicide prevention center opens in
China
By Antoaneta Bezlova
BEIJING - China's first suicide prevention
center, aimed at counseling and crisis intervention to
curb the worrisome jumps in suicide rates, opened last
week after years of denial and attempts to cover up the
sensitive issue of suicide.
"Suicide has become
an urgent problem to be solved in the field of public
health," said the Communist Party's flagship newspaper,
the People's Daily, in an unusually frank assessment of
China's grim suicide rate.
Some 2 million
Chinese attempt to commit suicide annually, driven by
frustration with rising unemployment and depression,
researchers here have said. An estimated 287,000 Chinese
succeed in killing themselves each year, accounting for
3.6 percent of all deaths in this country of 1.3 billion
people, according to findings by the newly established
Beijing Suicide Research and Prevention Center.
The center says suicide is the No 5 killer in
China after cerebral vascular disease, bronchitis and
chronic pulmonary emphysema, liver cancer and pneumonia.
Furthermore, it is the biggest cause of death among
people aged between 15 and 34, according to the
country's first-ever large-scale suicide survey, made
public last month.
While the center is new, its
physicians have been doing research on suicide for
years. In 1995, specialists at the Chinese Center for
Disease Control and Prevention teamed up with a longtime
psychiatrist in China, Canadian Dr Michael Phillips, and
initiated a study into the causes of suicide in 23
communities around the country.
Their latest
paper, on why and how Chinese kill themselves, was
compiled from scores of interviews with suicide victims'
families and was published on Saturday in the British
medical journal Lancet. The results of the survey, noted
the People's Daily, "put an end to the nation's history
of lacking systematic and authoritative suicide
statistics and analysis".
"The opening of this
center is a sort of a breakthrough because it shows the
change in government attitudes," said one official at a
foreign aid organization in Beijing. "For years, they
[government officials] thought having many suicide
deaths was something damaging to China's image of a
socialist paradise. Just a couple of years ago, they
avoided the topic and even canceled a research
conference on it. Now, it seems, they are ready to face
up to it."
"The changing culture and society
have given us an opening," agreed Phillips, the
executive director of the new center, at the launching
ceremony. The center will launch a 24-hour hotline to
help people cope with psychological crises and try to
stop anyone who calls from attempting to commit suicide,
said Zhang Yanping, its vice director.
China's
high suicide rate has characteristics that distinguish
it from that of other countries. For instance, the
suicide rate in China's rural areas is three times as
high as that in urban areas. Ninety percent of suicides
happen in the countryside.
China is also pointed
to as the only country where female suicides outnumber
those of males, particularly among young women in rural
areas. In developed countries, the rate for male
suicides is at least three times that of female ones.
What is more, in other countries 90 percent of
the suicide population suffers from mental disorders,
while in China the rate is much lower. Instead,
widespread joblessness and inability to cope with
sweeping social changes are seen as major factors behind
the high incidence of suicide attempts in China.
Unemployment is a new problem for communist
China and one that many workers find difficult to
accept. Aggressive reforms of state-owned firms are
leaving many out of work, with no social insurance, no
medical benefits and few opportunities for
re-employment.
Official figures show that more
than 6 million laid-off state workers have not found new
jobs, while 10 million new workers enter the labor
market each year. Many enterprises are stopping
production before being declared defunct. As the state
firms run out of money, workers are being told to take a
"long holiday" and go home.
"They [the
unemployed] are the most difficult to deal with," said
Guo Nianfeng, a researcher with the Chinese Association
for Mental Health. "They feel it is wrong that the state
is not taking care of them any longer. It is not a
problem of few individuals, but a growing social
problem."
While male workers are those who
usually attempt and commit suicide in the cities, in
China's rural areas most suicide victims are young
women. Researchers say this reflects the fact that women
in the countryside bear the brunt of economic reforms -
they do 70 percent of work in the fields while their
husbands leave to look for work in the cities.
"It is certain that women are left facing more
vulnerabilities as they try to cope on their own," said
Li Xianyuan, the director of research at the new
prevention center.
Although there is a crippling
lack of data to suggest that the situation was always
that bad in the countryside, the economic reforms the
late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping launched more than
two decades ago are not entirely to be blamed for the
phenomenon. Traditional thinking also plays a role. In a
country like China, with a long feudal history and
Confucian tradition which holds men in high esteem,
rural women often have little appreciation of the value
or their own lives.
Moreover, Chinese society
maintains that suicide is not unacceptable when the
person wants to make a strong statement of protest or
evade an unbearable reality in befitting manner.
(Inter Press Service)
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