Mad Men: China’s mental health picture

Posted By Damjan DeNoble

The surface level comparison of China today resembling the USA of the 1950s has been made by every American that’s ever visited China.  Mostly, the comparison revolves around the Chinese attitude towards health.

From a societal health perspective, the comparison is easy  to make solely based on the number of male smokers one sees walking down a China city street.  Most visual media from 1950s America shows a society enveloped in a cloud of cigarette smoke that is very similar, and as pop culture driven as we tend to be as Americans, it is this set of images that readily come to mind.  I was reminded of this fact when watching an episode of Mad Men the other night, where both the male and female leads seem to smoke non-stop.

From a health institution perspective, it is tempting to draw the comparison when walking into a China state hospital, with all those nurses dressed in pristine white uniforms and matching white hats that look like paper boats; or the buildings that look like they are sixty years old (which they often are), the product of some giant three year old titan, playing with square and rectangle blocks the size of twelve-wheel semi trucks. But beyond that, the comparison is too much surface level, and does little to relate the complex societal differences in the two nations.

But, as a simple reflection of health attitudes, the observation that Chinese smoke more (40% of the world’s male smokers are Chinese), and that Americans used to smoke more but now smoke less is valuable, because it tells us something about the level of health education in China.  Namely, it tells us that health education is very low.

(I had a co-worker at the Kro’s Nest who objected against us doing a World AIDS day fundraiser because people with HIV would come into the restaurant and contaminate the glass and silverware with their saliva.  This is a bit frightening considering that HIV/AIDS has recently become China’s deadliest infectious disease).

This is a two edged sword that cuts twice in one direction.  First, and most obvious, lower health education leads to worse health outcomes.  And second,  the opportunity for the use of health as a dangerous political tool is heightened.  This is especially true with stigmatized conditions like mental health and HIV/AIDS.  So it is very worrying that Professor Sun of Beijing University was quoted in Newsweek as saying that;

“nearly all petitioners — people who come to Beijing to ask the central government for help — are mentally ill and should be put away.”

Having said that, this is not a China phenomenon, but one that has permeated history.  Indeed, it was America that originally championed the use of mental institutions as pseudo prisons.  The stigma only started to be lifted, well, around the 1950s.