This article from 2000 has a fascinating take on suicide in China. I don’t really believe its conclusions, but it opens up a window into Chinese mental health seven years ago. A team of psychologists from Canada and the Chinese Academy of preventative Medicine interviewed the families, friends, and neighbors of people who had killed themselves in an attempt to diagnose mental illness after the fact.
Preliminary findings suggest that between 50% and 60% of Chinese people who commit suicide have some form of mental illness. [...] In fact, the importance of mental illness as an explanatory factor in Chinese suicides is not as great as in other countries, which typically report mental illness in over 90% of people who kill themselves. It is therefore a significant finding that up to 50% of young Chinese women who commit suicide may be suffering from no mental illness at all.
In the US, a suicide attempt is (in my non-expert experience) pretty much a de facto diagnosis of some sort of mental illness. Basically, in our current system, a person cannot want to end her own life unless she suffers from some sort of mental problem.
In a complementary research project, the team has interviewed people who attempted suicide but were taken to hospital and saved. Asked when they had first thought of committing suicide, an astonishing 29% reported that they had decided to kill themselves only ten minutes or less before the attempt. Fully 50% reported that they had contemplated suicide for less than two hours.
Tidbits like this made me doubt the methodology of this study. True, impulsivity does play a part in suicide attempts, but there’s quite a difference between “I’ve never contemplated suicide before, and now I’m going to kill myself” and, “I’ve been thinking about this for months, and I’ve decided that today will be the day.” I’d worry that, somewhere in translation, a history of suicidality without immediate intent could be lost. In the process, nearly 50% of suicidal Chinese women might be labeled as stupidly impulsive instead of seriously ill.
