Mental Health Planning for One Billion People: A Chinese Perspective

Peter Strathy is Vice-President Planning, Doctors’ Hospital, Toronto.

The editors are well qualified to assemble this collection of papers written by Chinese psychiatrists and scientists. Tsung-yi Lin, a professor of psychiatry at the University of British Columbia, holds an academic appointment at Beijing Medical College. More importantly, since 1981 he has served as advisor to Chien Xin-Chung, Minister of Health of the People’s Republic of China, with the assignment of helping the Minister to plan and develop China’s mental health services. Leon Eisenberg is a professor in social medicine and psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School. The many papers were actually prepared as contributions to a National Workshop on Psychosocial Aspects of Primary Health Care held in Beijing and Shanghai in 1983.

This volume is the first comprehensive report to appear on the development of mental health services in China since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. Over the past 35 years all health services have evolved as a part of the overall social system. Health, with a continuing major ideological commitment by the nation, is intertwined with the social fabric for collective support. Successful primary care and prevention programs at the local community or workplace level draw heavily on the active participation of the masses themselves for self-responsibility and to provide care for family and community members.

Intensive use is made of para-professionals (barefoot doctors) and volunteers. Health services represent in many respects a political solution to harsh economic realities, but it is a solution that has achieved great results and unprecedented progress.

The papers cover a wide range of topics: demography, problems of the aged, problems of children and adolescents, primary prevention services, and the structure and function of the Chinese family. In a concluding chapter Professor Eisenberg examines the potential mental health implications of the new one-child family policy of the nation.

This is a fascinating book from which Western health professionals and policy planners can draw much of value. For example, the papers on innovative grass roots services in urban, suburban, and rural communities present well-developed models that deliver mental health services in a humane and effective way. A new community health movement in Canada and other Western nations now advocates a return to deinstitutionalized, primary prevention, and community-based health programs. The People’s Republic of China has already shown the way.

This book will be of great interest to health professionals and policy analysts. It will be widely read by those interested in China and the development of mental health programs at both a national and a community level.