The family dilemma
It's not difficult to understand why family members are reluctant to take mentally ill people home. For one, taking care of a mentally ill person takes a lot of time, money and effort.
Mental patients can be destructive to families. Schizophrenia, for example, mostly occurs in people's adulthood, and in rural areas, this can throw a family into poverty. In rural areas, it's not uncommon for family members, bereft of other options, to confine mentally ill people in cages or pigsties so as to stop them from hurting themselves and to make it easier for the family to keep an eye on them.
Even in developed cities, reports of family members unwilling to accept rehabilitated patients are common. In July 2013, the Beijing News reported the case of Xiaoling, a mental patient who killed his girlfriend during the height of his illness. When the hospital decided that he had recovered and was ready to be discharged, his mother and sister protested vehemently to the hospital. "You are under the care of doctors and nurses in the hospital, and that sets my mind at ease. You have to know that with your disease, you'll need a doctor by your side your whole life," his mother wrote to his son, who lives in a hospital in Haidian district.
If mentally ill people have a relapse due to insufficient care or discontinuing medication, family members will need to take legal responsibility if they commit crimes. In 2009, when a mental patient in Shandong Province killed three people, his custodians were required to pay 1.06 million yuan to the victims' families.
"Relatives want to get rid of their burden and they regard hospitals as their asylums," a psychiatrist told Phoenix Weekly. Sending them to hospitals is the most economic choice.
"In more developed cities, the healthcare system covers most of the hospitalization fees for the mentally ill. Custodians only need to pay several hundred yuan each month, or even nothing," he said.
The stigma that surrounds mentally ill patients and their families is another reason why they are unwilling to accept rehabilitated patients.
"Families often try their best to cover up the fact that they have a mentally ill relative at home," Ye Xiaodan, doctor at Kangning Hospital, told Phoenix Weekly. This is partly reflected in the difficulty of finding people to talk to the media - almost all patients and their families who were approached for interviews declined to talk about their illness.
Neighbors, policemen and community workers said when they approach these families to offer help, they are often refused.
"They think it's humiliating. It's rare for them to participate in our rehabilitating activities," psychiatrist Zhang Chong, who organizes group counseling in Beijing's Haidian district, told Phoenix Weekly. "Only the older patients are willing to come. The younger ones and their families usually face more stigma."
Violence exaggerated
On July 8, 2015, a shooting involving a long-term schizophrenic patient in Suning county, Hebei Province led to the death of two policemen and two villagers. A year ago, a mental ill person in a town in Heilongjiang Province set a police car on fire, killing one policeman.
These cases show the consequences of a lack of a strong rehabilitation and management system for the mentally ill who are out of hospital. Yang Weihua, Xu Wei's lawyer, said he also had concerns when he agreed to take on Xu's case. "It's not that I worry about Xu hurting others. But society lacks a support system for the mentally ill, making it easy for patients like Xu to relapse," he said.
According to the National Health and Family Planning Commission, by the end of 2014, there were 4.3 million people with a severe mental illness in China. Recent research commissioned by Kangning Hospital shows that there are over 180 million people in China with various mental disorders.
Xie Bin, from the Shanghai Mental Health Center, told Phoenix Weekly that only 5 percent of mentally ill patients exhibit violent tendencies. "If media reports sensationalize their violence, they are labelling this group as violent because of their illness. This is more disastrous than the 5 percent of violent patients," a mental health official said.
