The central government will build 550 more mental hospitals and psychiatric departments in general hospitals in the next two years in an effort to treat patients and decrease the danger they could cause to society, state media reported yesterday.
The large number of mentally ill patients on the mainland is becoming a more prominent social problem, especially as killing sprees by patients had increased recently, said Dr Yin Li , vice-minister of health, according to a report by Xinhua.
Mental disease has overtaken heart disease, respiratory disease and cancer as the biggest burden on the nation's health system.
At least 100 million Chinese suffer some form of mental disease, according to statistics from the National Centre for Mental Health under the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention. More than 16 million of them are considered serious cases.
Three mentally ill patients have been involved recently in fatal attacks. One man killed a villager and injured two others with a home-made spear on May 19 in Longfeng village, Yunnan . A father stabbed his 13-year-old daughter and her 12-year-old classmate to death with scissors in Daqing , Heilongjiang , on May 26, then killed himself by jumping from his fourth-floor flat. Police confirmed that he was a mental patient.
Another patient beat a person to death and injured two on May 23. Afterwards, it was discovered that he had killed his wife and injured his daughter and another villager in a 2006 series of attacks.
