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In a pension service center, in addition to the elderly, there are also young people with intellectual disabilities, and people with schizophrenia. Because of trivial matters, the disabled person was beaten by a mentally ill person, although it did not cause actual damage, but it was also a wake-up call. The care of persons with mental illness should still be carried out by professional institutions. Socialized old-age care institutions should focus on old-age care services.
According to the surging news, a video of a man in Suining, Jiangsu Province, being beaten in a home care service center was recently circulated on the Internet. On October 31, 2021, the public account "Wireless Suining" of the Publicity Department of the Suining County Party Committee issued a notice saying that the crying man wang mou in the video was 25 years old, with a second-degree intellectual disability, and was temporarily sent by his family to the old-age service center involved. On October 29, Wang's loud crying caused Zou Mouying, a schizophrenic patient who was also in the pension service center, to be emotionally unstable, and Zou Mouying threw a chair cushion at his shoulder and head, and after on-site inspection, both sides did not have any injuries.
Although Zou Mouying used the cushion of a chair to beat people, which did not bring actual harm to the beaten person, such a beating scene still made people sweat. What if she hit someone with something hard like a chair? After all, Zou Mouying is a schizophrenic patient, and it is doubtful whether she has the ability to control her emotions.
According to the notice, the place of the incident is a pension service institution in a township of Suining County, the main business is to provide day care and entertainment services for the surrounding elderly, there are currently 3 staff members and 5 service objects. Among these 5 service recipients, not all of them are ordinary elderly people, one of them (Zou Mouying) is a schizophrenic patient, and wang mou who was beaten is not only intellectually disabled, but also a young person. Do old-age service institutions accept service recipients with mental disabilities and intellectual disabilities have corresponding service capabilities? At least from the video, when there was a problem, there was no staff to stop it, only the elderly who were also in the center to stop it.
The elderly with mental disorders are not ordinary elderly people, need special care, and are not suitable for living with ordinary elderly people in ordinary elderly care centers. Not to mention young people with intellectual disabilities. Patients with mental disorders require specialized medical and nursing facilities. The Mental Health Law stipulates that township and town governments and neighborhood offices shall, on the basis of the actual conditions in their respective areas, organize and carry out work such as preventing the occurrence of mental disorders and promoting the rehabilitation of persons with mental disorders. However, in reality, at the township and street levels, it is difficult to have the energy and financial resources to carry out rehabilitation and care for patients with mental disorders. Although the Mental Health Law provides for encouraging and supporting organizations and individuals to provide mental health volunteer services and build mental health public welfare facilities, in fact, there are very few specialized care institutions for persons with mental disorders. Especially in rural areas, farmers cannot afford to pay even if they do.
In fact, the problem of severely mentally ill persons being left unattended in rural areas is widespread. In 2021, Jilin Provincial Television reported a case of a man with severe mental illness who was chained by his mother for 7 years. Similar things have been reported in Guangxi, Fujian, Guangdong, Henan and other places. A court in Inner Mongolia has just tried a case in which the husband tied his wife to a tree and starved her to death because she suffered from a mental disorder.
Under the Mental Health Act, hospitalization for mental disorders is voluntary. However, patients with severe mental disorders who have already committed acts that endanger the safety of others, or who are at risk of endangering the safety of others, should be hospitalized, that is, compulsory hospitalization. But what if he or herself and his close relatives cannot afford to be hospitalized? For many rural people with mental disorders, what their families can do is usually to lock the patients in their homes so as not to hurt others outside.
For patients with less severe mental disorders, voluntary hospitalization. Patients who are not hospitalized should be properly cared for by a guardian according to regulations. However, their guardians often do not have the time and energy to take care of them, and there is no professional, inexpensive rehabilitation and care institution to take care of them, and their families can only hand them over to ordinary nursing institutions.
Just like Zou Mouying and Wang Mou in the above-mentioned beating incident, they should have been cared for by a professional institution, but they had to be sent to a nursing center. This time, because of the beating incident, public opinion attracted attention, and the town government transferred them to a professional medical institution for treatment. But what do they do after they are discharged from a medical institution? It is obviously not appropriate to go back to the ordinary nursing home, even if they have met the discharge criteria, but who can guarantee that they will not fall ill again in the future and do something that harms other people in the nursing center?
The care of people with mental illness in rural areas is a difficult problem. To ensure their basic livelihood, but also to avoid them from causing harm to others, but also low cost, affordable. This problem requires the attention of the whole society and the necessary resources to be invested to solve it.
Sim Province