On 26 million depressed Chinese – the WTO column

Fat and happy

The summer is nearing and that means that many journalists fly on their automatic pilot. Figures, especially huge figures, also go down very well with an audience looking for easy to digest messages, so we could read this week that 200 million or 11 percent of the current mainland Chinese population will be obese somewhere later this century. Even more intriguing I found the news that 26 million Chinese suffer from depressions, two percent of the population, while only ten percent of those 26 million is being treated. That of course is calling for some evangelizing by the pharmaceutical industry.

I’m not sure whether this is good news or bad news. Like many diseases, much depends on the way a disease is defined. Media, doctors and academics thrive on making us worried about all kind of statistical health risks. In a previous live I have dedicated a part of my life on gruesome occupations diseases, caused by asbestos, organic solvents and other killers. I know too much of this work to blame a wrong mindset for all these diseases.
But I do think that two percent of officially depressed people is a pretty good score compared to the score of many developed countries.
While the market for anti-depressives is booming in the west, of course eager pharmaceutical industries wonder how to tap into the Chinese market. According to my observations we see here a nice clash between different cultures
Let me generalize here in a grand way to illustrate some of the ways how Chinese deal with happiness, which differs greatly from the way I was used to that in Europe. In Europe, as religion became much less the centerpiece of society compared to the first 60 years of last century, people have been looking for alternative ways to seek happiness. The promise of the paradise after a hardworking life did not work anymore, and the western world has been seeking for every possible way, including medical treatment, to regain that happiness while they were still living.
Those expectations have been in China traditionally different. Unhappiness, misfortune have been so much part of daily life that being depressed is very much an accepted way of life and not something Chinese would not seek treatment for. Even more, a few times my Chinese friends took me apart. “You are always so happy and optimistic,” they told me. “Have you ever seen a doctor for that?”

I do not want to encourage the pharmaceutical industry to develop medicine against optimism and happiness, but the rather diametrically opposed approach does have severe repercussions for the question whether there is a huge market in China for anti-depressives. Well, in emergencies the sales force of those industries can of course always rely on their own products.

Fons Tuinstra

Books on mental health