Love Our Children by Caring for Their Mental Health

In early November 2021, when I was back in my hometown visiting my mother-in-law, she told me that just the day before I arrived, a 16-year-old at a school near their village had died by suicide, reportedly because his phone had been confiscated by a teacher. Last night (December 20, 2021) I heard that an 18-year-old in a nearby village had also died by suicide a couple of days earlier, for unknown reasons.

In neighboring villages, two children took their own lives in little over a month; it is truly heartbreaking. Before the pandemic, the WHO, projecting epidemiological trends, predicted that by 2030 depression would overtake cancer as the world's leading medical burden. Now it seems the pandemic is bringing that date forward. Adolescents are a high-risk group for depression, and suicide from depression is the leading cause of death among young people.

Parents must especially help their children process psychological pressure, so that their children's lives do not become a nightmare. In this age of population explosion, people's illnesses are closely tied to the enormous pressure of survival competition. Enough with exhorting and pushing children to excel! Let our children just live well.

Just in the last couple of days, my son told me in a conversation that the top student in his school had recently dropped in the rankings, and that teachers were urging him not to feel too pressured. This boy is in the same honors ("qiangji") class as my son and is a close friend; he came to my son to talk, and told him, with deep feeling, that from now on he would live on his own terms and no longer live under the pressure of being number one.

I understand exactly how he feels, because I shared his experience. I too was once the top student in my whole school; my photo with a big red flower and my profile were always on the school's honor roll, which was the source of both my vanity and my pressure in school. From age 17 to 21, my mental health was poor, and I hovered on the edge of suicide. In university I often carried a dagger, ready to kill myself at any moment.

So now I do not expect my son to be the school's top student. But he is a child who loves learning, and his grades are already near the top—some subjects he already tops school-wide, and he is steadily improving. So I put great effort into accompanying him, often talking him through things and telling him not to live under so much pressure.

I feel I was a dangerous person in my adolescence. The only reason I did not kill myself was my high-school Chinese teacher. Of all my teachers, only he cared about my mental health; the others cared only about my grades. I got into a fight in my first year of high school and transferred to a new school. Our new school was just being built and badly needed impressive exam results; a promising student like me was exactly what the teachers hoped would "launch a satellite" for the school, so they all wanted me to get into Tsinghua or Peking University. Given my province-wide ranking back then, I really did have a chance.

But in the end these expectations all turned into pressure that crushed me. I was a late-blooming student, matching what the Dutch brain scientist Dick Swaab describes in We Are Our Brains: intelligence does not fully mature until late adolescence, and I had an incredible burst of progress in high school. I have to admit that at this age my mind was fragile. So this enormous pressure, plus family poverty and poor health, led me to think of suicide often. I now especially wish my former teachers and classmates would treat me as a negative example rather than a positive one, to teach other students to value mental health. Unfortunately, most do not.

When my psychological pressure became too great, my Chinese teacher very timely gave me a copy of Liuushahe's Zhuangzi in Modern Chinese. I seized it like a treasure, and that book turned my life around. Zhuangzi was a deep and powerful thinker; Liuushahe had weathered much of life; both were brilliant, witty, and versatile. Together they opened a spiritual door for me unlike any before, so Zhuangzi as annotated by Liuushahe deeply drew me. It was the best spiritual nourishment of my high-school years, and I still cannot forget it; I have bought several copies of Zhuangzi in Modern Chinese to keep, and sometimes give one to a troubled friend. Of course, reading it now at my age, I no longer feel the nectar I felt in high school. But to me this book was like a savior; it made my inner self extraordinarily strong, and I remember it for life.

Nowadays I always keep a respectful distance from fame and gain; I do not envy high officials, tycoons, or academic authorities, never look up to or curry favor with them, dislike courting the crowd, and have chosen a go-with-the-flow attitude, raising my child with Daoist philosophy. A few years ago I read about a top Hubei student, Liu Zhiyu, who became a monk at Longquan Temple in Beijing under the Dharma name Xianyu. He wrote that his favorite book in high school was the Zhuangzi; reading his words, I felt a deep kinship. Master Xianyu now devotes himself to psychological counseling; I need not guess to know we have traveled much the same inner road.

I have no opinion on Master Xianyu's becoming a monk; it is a reasonable choice. I only regret that someone as intelligent as he could not see the problems at Longquan Temple and chose to be a monk there. I briefly studied at Longquan Temple in 2015 and quickly saw its problems, writing several articles questioning it, which drew attacks from Longquan fans. When Longquan Temple was engulfed in scandal in 2018, many of those who had attacked me were surprised at how accurately I had foreseen it.

Predicting the future of something is not hard, as long as you judge by the basic laws of how things develop rather than parroting others. Back then Longquan was conducting a massive god-making campaign, and the air reeked of personality cult. As everyone knows, all personality cults are sordid; man-made gods cannot withstand the washing of time and sooner or later reveal their greed and hypocrisy. Throughout history, without exception. Did not Liang Qichao, with one ten-thousand-word essay, expose Yuan Shikai when he deified himself and restored the monarchy?

At Longquan Temple I met many outstanding people from all walks of life—some returned from overseas study, some elites from top domestic universities, quite a few with PhDs from Tsinghua and Peking University. Many first turned to Buddhism because they were trapped in spiritual predicaments they could not escape. Buddhism itself is not bad; it is just that people often use it to deceive and hurt others.

Malthus once said that when a species overbreeds, a vicious survival competition arises, and only those adapted to the competition survive. Darwin built on this to propose the theory of evolution, with its famous "natural selection, survival of the fittest," making a foundational contribution to modern biology. Today, the greatest problem of the human species is overbreeding (the essence of epidemics is also overbreeding), so humanity is trapped in all kinds of vicious competition. To win these competitions, many people disregard ethics and morality, lack compassion, stop at nothing, and trample on others. So many people have been hurt in their hearts; some fragile ones end up depressed. In a sense, depression is a social disease.

Spiritual self-rescue is an extremely difficult and dangerous business: those who succeed are elevated, but those who fail often choose suicide. That is why medicine most strongly emphasizes preventing mental illness rather than treating it after it arises.

Do not force children to become outstanding, because, frankly, we ourselves do not seem to have become outstanding (at least I have not). We should not force children to achieve what we ourselves have not. Besides, what does "becoming outstanding" get you? Will you live an extra life? Whether our children are outstanding or not, we should accept them, love them, protect them, comfort them when hurt, encourage them when they fail; only this builds a lifelong sense of security in children. Those who demand that their children become dragons can only be called rigid old fogeys; they have nothing to do with wisdom.