When Human Beings' Baffling Behavior Grows More and More Frequent

Over the past few days the news has been roiling about a girl from Chun'an, Qiandao Lake, Zhejiang, who was lured away by two tenants and ultimately murdered; the two tenants then took their own lives. The whole affair is deeply baffling, and all sorts of speculations are flying about.

As a physician, my instinct is that this was very likely an expanded suicide (extended suicide) carried out by people suffering from depression.

The man and woman who abducted the girl had led extremely tortuous lives for many years; apart from each other, they had lost almost all social and emotional support.

Their conduct over the years also shows that their ability to make an honest living in society was limited, their ability to handle family and emotional problems was limited, and their ability to cope with life's surprises was limited. Years of deceiving their relatives and friends had also made them live into the very people they themselves despised. Judging from the news photographs, both of them had the faces of typical depressive patients.

In the months before the incident they toured many parts of the country. It seems that once they decided to take out loans on various online platforms for this last extravagance of a life, they had already resolved to end their lives together soon after.

Depressive patients are typical people of "learned helplessness"; they lack the ability and confidence to solve life's difficulties, and their view of themselves and of life is negative and pessimistic. Many depressed people look sunny, but inside they are fragile and unable to handle the affairs of their own lives. This pair of tenants may, over the years, have been relying on comforting each other to fend off their depression.

I cannot be sure whether, when they first conceived the idea of a joint suicide, an impulse toward expanded suicide was already present. So-called expanded suicide, in medicine also called altruistic filicide, occurs when a patient in a state of severe dejection feels overwhelmed by difficulties and sees no hope, forms a strong suicidal urge, and resolves to escape suffering by taking his own life; thinking that his loved ones go on living in "misery," and wishing to spare them that suffering and misfortune, he often kills his spouse or children and then kills himself. It is one of the main reasons depressed people kill others.

Although in this case the girl was not the couple's biological daughter, one cannot rule out that, after learning the girl's family background, the couple also felt sympathy for her hard life, judged her existence to be deeply "painful," and hoped to end it all for her by killing her—ultimately selecting her as the object of their expanded suicide.

Suicides by the depressed—even expanded suicides—have become all too common. Last October, after a man in Hunan faked his own death to cheat on insurance, his wife drowned herself and their children; it later emerged that the woman had a history of mental illness. Not long ago another woman with postpartum depression likewise drowned herself together with her child. All these are acts of expanded suicide by the depressed.

The rising incidence of depression has been a global social problem since World War II. Research by Professor Seligman, president of the American Psychological Association, shows that over the course of the twentieth century depression increased enormously—even more than tenfold—and that the age of those affected kept falling; today nearly 9% of middle-school students are troubled by depression.

Among women born around 1910, only about 3% had experienced severe depression by age thirty; among women born in the 1950s, some 60% had experienced severe depression by age thirty. Of course, not all of that 60% ultimately developed depression—only prolonged, unrelieved severe depression qualifies as major depressive disorder. The rise in depression among men is likewise alarming.

Why is it that, having evolved to this day, so many of us suffer from depression? This is a question well worth pondering. The phenomenon reflects deep problems in our society, leaving the human spirit nowhere to rest. Hence in recent years there has been a rebound in religious yearning; many people seek religion simply to find some spiritual anchor.

The human population has exploded over the last hundred or two hundred years; the earth's inhabitants are plainly living far too crowded together. Anyone with even a slight grasp of human history can see that, compared with people of the past, our modern life is first too mechanized and standardized, and second far too stressful. No wonder depression is so prevalent.

According to the sociologist Gustave Le Bon, the great majority of people have no independent convictions; they simply drift with the prevailing tides of opinion like a "crowd," and living conformably is their life's choice.

That is why fashions, trends, and certain plague-like collective emotions can spread through a population like great epidemics. Advertisers, writers with hidden agendas, warmongers, and politicians can always exploit this human weakness—by whipping up emotion and stirring conformity—to reach their ends.

From a medical standpoint I feel that further evolution and development of our society does not favor human physical and mental health, because the ever-denser flow of information and the ever-more-frequent need to deal with strangers are destroying the spirits of those with weaker psychological resilience.

We may face more and more such baffling news events in future. After the public has sighed, raged, grieved, tensed, and panicked, none of this effectively solves the problem.

Humankind's ability to manage society is also limited; we cannot completely prevent such acts. Ultimately easing this problem will require new ideas, new forms of social organization, and new modes of education.

For the moment, though, we have no especially good way to solve it. People with the various mental disorders are becoming a hidden danger to social safety, and their care also takes up a large share of total medical spending.

Yet, regrettably, the role human medicine can play in this matter is still limited. The treatment of depression, bipolar disorder, and anxiety disorders has so far produced no breakthroughs.

I can only hope that each of us will reflect more deeply on the toll social problems take on human physical and mental health, arrange our own lives as sensibly as possible, educate our children wisely, and—while helping ourselves out of spiritual hardship—avoid leaving future troubles for our children. After all, the family is the most basic social cell and also the root of many people's psychological troubles; but at the same time it is also each of us's finest spiritual harbor.