I watched several true stories about mental illnesses happening in China during the weekend. All stories are tragic and I feel really sorry for those patients and their families. The most important thing is how to be aware of psychological disorders so people can effectively prevent it from happening.
The following is the brief introduction of those stories. Young college student had depression and killed his grandparents who have raised him and lived with him for over 20 years. His parents divorced when he was 5-6 years old. Soon bother of his parents remarried and he since then lived with his grandparents. He barely felt affection from his parents but he was useless and nobody wanted him. This was the main reason triggered his depression. He wanted to destroy everything. Before he killed his grandparents mercilessly, he took high dose of anti-depressant, which made him super excited and he could not control himself at all. In his eyes at that moment, his grandparents were dogs who wanted to hurt him. Neither of his parents cared him enough. They gave birth to him but failed to raise him as a normal human being.
A middle aged woman ruthlessly chopped off his son’s hands in another story. It turned out that she had schizophrenia. The reason was long term depression and lack of communication with other people. She was not able to have children. Infertility in rural area was a woman’s fatal mistake. Her value obviously deprecated. Her husband worked in another city and her in-laws refused to communicate with her. Her only son who was adopted 11 years ago became her only comfort. As a matter of fact, she has developed schizophrenia and had treated before family realized it. Until one day rumor said her husband had another woman, she had nowhere to release her fury and depression but chopping off his son’s both hands. Most likely, she had no idea what she was doing at that moment when she did it. But the fact was the family was destroyed and her son was deeply hurt.
A female college graduate was found to live in a shabby smelly abandoned house. Actually she had been living there for 8 years. Her family thought she was a shame and refused to take her home because she had schizophrenia. Her mental disorder was due to being dumped by her boyfriend in college. She was taken home and started to take medicine. When her condition was getting stable, she married to a man without informing her mental status. People believed marriage would finally solve her problem. But her illness came back soon after she got married. Her parents had to take her home and since then she started her miserable life. Her living condition, shabby smelly house, no visitors, no care from family, ignored by others, made her disease worse. With the help of local mental health center, she started systematic therapy. It is hard to take care of an individual with mental disorders, especially the severe ones like schizophrenia. But at least basic therapy should be helpful.
For patients described above, environmental force rather than genetic factor plays a critical role. Being ignored by parents, failure of basic communication, and lack of awareness of mental health eventually accelerated the happening of those tragedies. When people advocate keeping physical fit, don’t forget mental health is as important as physical health, to some extent, even more important.
From genetic counselling's standpoint, GCs are not psychotherapists. But they deal with patients with chronic, fatal, incurable diseases. Care givers in a family would have a great deal of emotional and financial burden, which could drive people crazy. GCs can refer family members to see psychotherapists. But when counseling those patients and family, GC should pay attention to their emotional changes and encourage them to adapt accordingly and cope effectively, which I think would be a constructive counseling process.
