China more than any other country has gone from a largely agrarian economy to a high-tech one in a generation or so, needless-to-say there are emotional and psychological casualties en route to the now Jerusalem. So what are they doing about is? Since about 2007 the government has woken up and 'smelt the coffer' before the trickle becomes a flood of psychological patients without the necessary infrastructure embedded into society. Unfortunately they have not learned by the collective mistakes of the west and in particular America they have medicalized the symptoms by dragging in the high priest and apostles of drugs the psychiatric profession, and they are rubbing their little hands with gold and glee. Its the failure to consider not all patients are sick in the way the psychiatry depicts them there are many causal explanation for psychological problems that don't' need medication or hospitalization.
So in thrall are the Chinese to all things American they fail to appreciate that medicating a whole people that doesn't deal with the underlying causes is hopeless and Sisyphean. People have psychosomatic illnesses because they are emotionally distressed not because they are mad, bi-polar or depressed there is a rational explanation for their distress medicating them doesn't address the issue. Psychotherapy, group therapy, family and couple therapist will seek to help their citizens cope with these dramatic societal changes that are engulfing their society.
However the Chinese government thinks its better to have them diagnosed as mad, or in some other way dealt with rather than addressing the underlying causes. The psychiatric profession across the world should not collude with the government of China to have their citizens medicated or worse still locked up.
The revolutionary psychiatrist Dr R.D. Lang spoke many years ago about the psychiatry profession being agents of - social control - and so they are today potentially in China - the ghost of Lang roams the corridors of power.
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