Psychiatric social work and socialism: problems and potential in China.
Social Work › Vol. 39 Nbr. 3, May 1994
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Psychiatric social work and socialism: problems and potential in China.
The People's Republic of China is no different from any other country in having a significant number of mentally ill citizens. The most extensive epidemiological study done in China found that the prevalence of schizophrenia is 6.06 per 1,000 in urban China and 3.42 per 1,000 in rural China (Research Coordinating Group, 1986), a total of approximately 4,500,000 people. Only about 2 percent of these individuals are hospitalized at any one time; over 90 percent of them are cared for by their families (Phillips, 1993). In contrast, only an estimated 40 percent of people with schizophrenia in the United States are cared for by their families (Torrey, 1988), and in the United Kingdom, 60 percent of those suffering their first episode of schizophrenia are cared for by their families (Perring, Twigg, & Atkin, 1990).
China has few community-based services to provide for the needs of mentally ill individuals and their families. Over the past decade some services such as work therapy stations (Xia, Yan, & Wang, 1987), factory liaison projects (Jiang, 1988), mobile psychiatric care units (Xia et al., 1987), and home programs (Leung, 1978; Shen, 1983, 1985) have evolved in the major urban centers, but these services reach only a tiny proportion of mentally ill people (Pearson, 1992). Moreover, the network of voluntary nongovernment agencies that provide ancillary services for mentally ill clients in Western countries does not exist in China. The preponderance of family-based care and the ...See the full content of this document
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