A national survey done by a Shanghai university showed that at the height of the epidemic in China, more than a third of the country’s population suffered from depression, anxiety, insomnia and acute stress.
The New York Times reported Monday that the effects could last 10 to 20 years, according to a warning from an expert in Beijing.
The report also said the New Coronavirus (CCP virus) pandemic that began in China has forced the Chinese population to confront mental health issues, a topic that has long been underappreciated here because of a lack of resources and widespread social stigma. During the Mao era, mental illness was declared a bourgeois delusion and the Chinese psychiatric system was destroyed. Even today, discrimination persists, and many people with mental illness are shunned, hidden away in their homes, or confined to mental institutions.
But with the outbreak of the new coronavirus, this state of invisibility increasingly needs to change. The uncertainty of the early days of the pandemic, combined with the weeks of grief and fear that followed, left both individual and collective psychological scars.
The report cites World Health Organization data that China has a severe shortage of psychotherapists, with only nine mental health professionals per 100,000 people as of 2017.
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