Eric's Beijing Diary

Once upon a time there was a little girl named Priscilla. Priscilla was a delightful child—inquisitive, curious, and active.

As she grew into adulthood, Priscilla developed a problem with sleeplessness. This struggle with sleeplessness began after her mother had put her on a regimen of traditional Chinese medicine. This medicine was not something she took because she was sick. Sometimes Chinese people will take Chinese medicine just because they think it might be good for them. At any rate Priscilla would sometimes go for days without being able to sleep. As this problem became evident, her mother told her to stop taking the Chinese medicine.

Later, after Priscilla moved to the big city to continue her education, she became profoundly depressed. What caused this? Was it a residual effect of the Chinese medicine? Or something else? It is significant that, while she had suffered sleeplessness in her hometown before she came to Kunming, the depression did not develop until she moved to Kunming. Why?

These questions and many more are addressed in my interview with Priscilla. As I do in every interview, I asked Priscilla, “What do you believe?” As I mention in the podcast, years ago I came to the conclusion that there are two questions you must answer if you are going to understand a culture:

• What do the people believe?
• Why do they believe it?

So what does belief have to do with something like depression? This is a difficult question to answer. As far as I know, people of every faith suffer from depression. So on an individual level it is hard to define. But is there anything we can say about the society as a whole relative to depression? For example, in China, young women are often subjected to a great deal of pressure if they are still unmarried at a certain age. In China, it is considered shameful for a woman to be single. But the problem does not only come from the beliefs of the people in a young woman’s world. The problem comes also from the fact that young woman herself often buys into the idea that it is shameful for her to be yet unmarried, and, if she ever gets married and has a daughter, she will often impose that same belief on her daughter and pressure her to get married.

Americans do not tend to think that it is shameful for a young woman to be unmarried. Mind you, it is normal for young women to want to get married. That’s true in America, and it’s true in China. The difference is that the Chinese woman carries the extra burden of having everyone around her asking her over and over why she isn’t married yet. That’s not to say that the American way is better. Americans go to the opposite extreme and trivialize marriage to the point where it’s viewed as sort of an extra “add on.” It’s just to say that Chinese young women and American young women have very different pressures because of the beliefs of the people in their society.

This example doesn’t apply to Priscilla directly—I have never heard her express any concern about this issue (perhaps because she is still in her early twenties). But I think it is a good example of how societal beliefs can affect how a person feels about herself. Sometimes it takes quite a bit of time to develop an understanding of the beliefs in a society and whether or not any of them really constitute a general view of life in that society. Ask one person what he believes, and you know what one person believes. Ask a thousand people what they believe, and you get a read on their culture that nothing else can give you.

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Labels: Depression, Mental Health

Working my way through the wicket gate at the Beijing West train station yesterday on my way back from Zhengzhou, I witnessed a lady being treated very roughly by the gate personnel. It was apparent that she did not have a ticket, and was trying to get through. You need a ticket to get on the train, but you need the same ticket to get off the train. You cannot leave the train station unless you are able to prove that you were a ticketed passenger. One of the gate keepers herded her into a channel with only one opening and held her there. She was frantic. Her situation was very painful to watch, but there's just no way you're going to get out of the train station if you don't have a ticket. The guy who was holding her captive was not treating her very well--I suppose it was his job to prevent thieves from getting out without paying.

In the Book of Ecclesiastes, Solomon says, "So I returned, and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun: and behold the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter..." But she was not the only one who was suffering. The guy who had her boxed in was becoming more and more uncomfortable. It was becoming apparent that something was different about this lady. She just didn't look like a thief who was trying to get away with something. She kept searching the crowd with her eyes, desperately looking for someone. My theory is that she has a handicap of some kind, and was being cared for by someone else, who had her ticket. They must have become separated. Solomon continues..."and on the side of their oppressors there was power; but they had no comforter." It is not easy to be the weak powerless person in a power struggle like the one I witnessed yesterday. But it isn't easy to be the strong person, either. In the Sixties, Simon and Garfunkel sang, "I'd rather be a hammer than a nail." I'm not so sure. Thinking of this guy's predicament now brings to mind a time years ago when I was in his shoes...

I knew I had seen that frantic look before. She was a rather frail looking woman, obviously quite upset. Well, what woman wouldn't be with six or seven men coming toward her? I was one of those men. We approached her quietly but firmly. I took off my glasses, because it looked as though the situation might be quite confrontational. We took her by the arms and led her to a small room. She was yelling the most vile obscenities, now; slowly the realization was growing within her that she was no match for us. We laid her on the bed, gently but firmly; her desperation had turned to anger. We fastened her to the bed with a heavy leather belt, then placed her wrists in cuffs fastened to the belt. The cuffs were locked. They were padded. Not uncomfortable. Her ankles were also placed in cuffs. At that precise moment when the realization hit her that it was over--that she was completely powerless, she did what I had seen so many of them do before her. She started crying. It was the cry of a child. A very lost child. A child with no one to turn to. I detested what we were doing to her, especially because I was a Christian. A Christian is supposed to set the captives free, not put them in bondage. A Christian is supposed to bring light, and joy, and peace, not hopelessness and despair...

The movie, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was filmed at Oregon State Hospital just after the summer that I worked there. I watched that film one evening when I was working the night shift at the same hospital several years later. I was in a different unit. It was a maximum security facility operated in conjunction with the State Prison system. But the philosophy was quite different. The director of this unit was not a psychologist. He had a PhD in philosophy. These people believed that mental illness was a choice. A bad choice. Any kind of craziness was immediately confronted as antisocial behavior. During the year that I worked there, I never saw anyone placed in full restraint. Admittedly, the clientele was more selective than what I had worked with at the Community Psychiatric Service, but the approach was also very, very different. I was struck by the difference between two different ways of approaching a problem.

Humanity. The use of power. How the powerful treat the powerless. These are questions which occupied much of my thinking over the years. It is easy for us to have compassion on the powerless. The oppressed. But God has mercy on the oppressor and the oppressed. On the powerless, and on the powerful, because He knows that they have something in common. They are both very, very lonely.

Labels: Mental Health