Following my piece in October China’s Need For Psychiatry is Growing, I came across the Straits Times article China’s suicide rate soaring that provided more evidence of how and why China needs to begin addressing the changing soical pressures faced by its citizens.

The context of the problem is best highlighted by the passage:

Society has been uprooted as traditional family and clan structures have disintegrated, straining social relations and putting the individual under immense stress, experts said.

In just one generation, China’s millennia-old civilisation has become one dedicated almost entirely to profit, with profound consequences.

Something many of us have come to see through trips outside of the big cities, or recognized while programming in the big cities and realizing that the elderly and children are quite often left behind - a story well documented by the fact that every year hundreds of millions of Chinese take to the trains to return home over the Chinese New Year.

A couple other interesting insights that this article provided that I think shed more light onto just how different China’s society is operating, and the different pressures that exist here are:

It is the only country in the world where more women than men take their own lives, with female suicides representing 58 percent of the total,

and

China is also one of the rare nations where suicides are more frequent in the countryside than in the cities.

‘The number of suicides is three to four times larger than in the cities,’