Demolishing the Walls of the Heart

In 1998, I had just finished the gaokao (national college entrance exam) and was spending the summer in my hometown. One evening, an elder from our village said to me: "Zhiyuan, you are the village's scholar, and there is something I need you to help with. A young woman in the village wants to kill herself; you have a way with words, so go and talk to her."

The young woman wanted to die because she had suddenly lost both of her young sons. Another villager had used fried rice mixed with poisoned rat bait to clear rats from his fields; three children under ten in the village, too young to know better, had divided up the fried rice he left by the field edge and eaten it. All three children were poisoned to death, none surviving.

Two of those three children were this young woman's sons, and she had no other children. One accident had taken both her boys. The woman's mind collapsed; no one could soothe her. That night she insisted on dying; her husband, I, and several other villagers were all in her home trying our best to calm her. Her husband, by kinship my clansman-brother, was clumsy with words and, overwhelmed by his own grief, had no idea how to comfort his wife.

I no longer remember how we calmed my sister-in-law that night; I only recall that everyone pinned their hopes on me, hoping I could reason with her, and that I did sit with her and say a great deal. We stayed with her for several days before she slowly came down from that extreme grief and could sleep a little. After that her emotions gradually stabilized, and I never again heard of her attempting suicide.

So many years have passed, and I still cannot forget this. I was eighteen that year, just coming of age; this scene was like an adulthood lesson for me. Afterward I left home to study elsewhere and never contacted the couple again. Time may slowly heal the scars in their hearts, but that piercing, bone-deep pain must still torment them often.

In early childhood I experienced two suicides among close relatives: one died, one survived. These two events deeply shaped me. My older brother once said my sympathy had flooded beyond all measure; its roots lie in those two suicides. Heaven arranged for me to witness such a cruel human tragedy at a very young age, and also gave me an understanding heart; this fate inevitably shaped my character.

No one gives up their life without deep-seated pain in the heart. Most of the suffering deep in the heart comes from love, loss of love, and various traumas. Heart-pain that cannot be relieved for a long time and has nowhere to be discharged leads to oppressive emotions and mental disorder. Once a mental disorder forms, the person's life is greatly affected.

Mentally ill patients unconsciously place great pressure on those around them. Their relatives and friends understand neither the mechanisms behind the disorder nor how to resolve it; not knowing how to accompany or care for them, they are often hurt by them instead. Over time, relatives and friends too become exhausted.

I come into contact with all kinds of mentally ill patients. Statistics show that nearly 20% of the general population has a mental disorder — that is, about one in five. Among all patients seen in hospitals, about 40% have a mental disorder. Among oncology outpatients and their families, over 60% have one. Among those seen in psychiatry, close to 100% do. In other words, over half of the people I deal with have a mental disorder.

Mental disorder makes people sensitive and suspicious, easily angered, anxious, depressed, frightened, and irritable; they often lose reality-testing, have grandiose cognitions, and may experience hallucinations and delusions, and act aggressively — all of which is understandable.

Ask my clansman-sister-in-law, who lost her two children, to look at fried rice now, and she may be overcome by uncontrollable grief and screaming — even if that fried rice contains no poisoned rat bait. To anyone who does not know her story, her reaction is as unreasonable as a madwoman's. But to those of us who can deeply share her grief, those reactions move us to tears.

Trauma damages the brain, leading in later life to cognitions that do not match reality, and at the moment these cognitions arise, the patient does not notice anything abnormal. Their fear, anxiety, and grief are so deep that they mistakenly believe the outside world is provoking and harming them. In such a state, they adopt wrong defensive strategies to protect themselves — for example, attacking others, avoiding others, or turning the attack inward, self-harm or suicide.

Normal people and mentally ill patients are separated as if by a wall of the heart, each unable to see the other, making their dealings very difficult. Ideally, psychiatrists and psychotherapists should be able to tear down this wall so they can see each other. Some psychological traumas can be healed; others cannot be cured for a lifetime. For families dealing with mental disorder, the most realistic solution is not to cure the patient completely, but for everyone to learn to see and understand each other and relate in a special way that improves their quality of life.

In reality, however, we often cannot achieve this ideal. Why? Because an experienced psychiatrist or therapist may find that in a family, mental disorder is rarely a single case: the one who comes to clinic may actually be the least disturbed member, while other family members who believe nothing is wrong have more severe problems. Communication with the patient's family is very difficult, and hopes for improving the family environment often fall through.

This happens because mental disorder involves both heredity and environment, which are like the trigger and the finger pulling it. The trigger alone will not fire; the finger alone will not fire. Only when both are present and the finger actually pulls the trigger does the bullet fire. The combined action of heredity and upbringing is the root cause of mental disorder.

Some people are born sensitive and fragile; they have inherited bad genes — reportedly some mutation on chromosome 21 — so their ability to regulate emotion is poor. If such people then encounter a bad upbringing, frequently subjected to abuse, overindulgence, or alternating between the two, they develop a trauma-type personality.

Trauma-type personality spawns various mental illnesses: paranoid disorder, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder (manic-depression), narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, depression, mania, anxiety disorder, phobias, and so on. The cognition, behavior, and speech of people with trauma-type personality differ from ordinary people, so living among others they are constantly accused and insulted, and they can only respond with anger or escape.

We still do not treat the mentally ill scientifically. We label them with many tags that hurt them: we say they are worthless, have bad characters, foul tempers, and are morally corrupt. We do not realize that they themselves suffer terribly from the torments their brain injury brings. Behind most sudden, explosive, seemingly unreasonable social news lies a mental disorder; people who are already ill are being cyberbullied by countless strangers.

I never join hot debates about any individual, because my information is incomplete and I cannot judge whether that person has a mental disorder. If I self-righteously condemned them, only to be joining a mob in abusing a mentally ill patient, I would feel my hands covered in blood and my sins grave — moral champions are often a crowd of ignorant people. I hold a basic principle: a normal person does not do unreasonable things. Once something is unreasonable, either someone is lying and stirring up trouble, or a mental disorder lies behind it. This principle keeps me from rushing to criticize others.

I also support abolishing the death penalty, because most death-row inmates have trauma-type personalities, with heart-rending tragic stories behind them. What we need is to push society toward greater civilization and health, reduce such traumatic events, get traumatized people treatment early, and prevent further atrocities — not to retaliate with killing.

If we do not eradicate the suffering in the human heart at its root, we will never solve such social problems. Only by tearing down the walls of the heart, seeing one another, and understanding one another can humanity build a relatively more peaceful and friendly society and maximize the happiness of all beings.

Some people must always take on the mission of helping everyone see one another, raising the public's scientific literacy and changing public cognition. To build a rational society, countless rational people must take up their mission and push society forward. Perhaps you are one of them; if you realize you have such a calling, then act!