Periodically media reports another incident of a mentally ill person in China being caged by his/her mother. There’s a suggestion of mother-blaming to the reports & invidious comparisons to the US or European approaches to mental health care. Invariably the article will include the 2009 Lancet journal estimate of 173 million Chinese with a diagnosable psychiatric disorder, of whom 158 million have never received treatment. Staggering even in a population of over 1.3 billion people. Though not as staggering as the incidence of mental illness in the US (62 million out of a population of 325 million).

Many people in the US over 50 years old recall the “insane asylums” where the mentally ill were warehoused in the most abysmal & abusive conditions with similar institutions for those with disability. Part of the gestalt of the 1960s & 1970s was getting rid of such inhumane abominations & replacing them with community-based treatment centers & often psychotropic drugs (the jury is still out on these). The transition has not always gone smoothly for those with mental illness, many of whom end up homeless–in particular, war veterans. So the US has little cause to gloat in comparison to China.

Still it must be acknowledged that the state of mental health treatment in China is not just a nightmare but outright barbarism. One Chinese publication reported that in Hebei Province alone (which surrounds Beijing), thousands of severely mentally ill people are kept in cages by their families as their only form of treatment. The state does not allocate resources or provide affordable facilities for the treatment of mental illness particularly in the rural regions. If the afflicted individual has engaged in a violent act, families feel they have no alternative to caging them & often chaining them for years.

China does have mental asylums but unfortunately it has been cited for using them to incarcerate thousands of political prisoners. Police-run psychiatric custody for democracy activists isn’t what you call addressing mental health problems which are massive in China.

It really has to be asked what is causing such widespread mental chaos & misery in China, the US, & elsewhere? China also has a particularly high suicide rate. The eugenicists will claim over-population. That’s their answer for everything capitalism throws out of whack. The reasons must include social, environmental, dietary, political–a sense our lives are not manageable & under our own control. One reason given in China is the immense population of migrant workers moving to cities for work, forced to abandon families & small children for most of the year. Thousands of working people in sweatshops must surely take a psychological toll. In short, capitalism is at odds with human dignity & social life.

This caged man is Zhao Xiaoyang at his home in Zhejiang province (near Shanghai). He was diagnosed with mental disorder in 2001 after beating a man to death. His mother shown here cares for him. One can only imagine the stress, loneliness, & depression she must endure.

Neoliberalism, the barbaric phase of capitalism, is incompatible with human happiness & dignity. And “that’s all she wrote.”

(Photo by William Hong/Reuters)

Over & over again in politics, we come up against the mistakes, betrayals, compromises of iconic figures & organizations–& not just in the past. In a world where elitism & authority are honored, the young are discouraged from challenging, scrutinizing, questioning. And history constructs saints & flawless champions. It’s a way of teaching deference. It’s also a way of hiding reality behind hagiography.

Screw deference. There’s a world to change & on the path to social transformation, nothing is off limits; nothing & no one is sacred. The young should be encouraged to interrogate everything & everyone–not to replace elitism with disrespect & cynicism, but to understand the way forward. For the young there can be no hero/ines but only teachers.

The examples from history & social struggle are too many to cite. It came up dramatically in the 2012 South African film “Dear Mandela,” where young housing activists questioned policies of the ANC government & Nelson Mandela. (Mazwi Nzimande, one of the young leaders, is leading protests now against xenophobic violence.) It came up in 2011 when Dolores Huerta from the United Farm Workers accepted the Medal of Freedom award from Obama one month after his regime permanently barred children farm workers from safety protections. It comes up with Angela Davis who cannot break loyalty with the Democratic Party; it comes up with numerous civil rights & feminist leaders who compromised rights to curry favor with the Democratic Party. It comes up when Mao Tse Tung is questioned. (Some misguided even cling to the sanctity of Joseph Stalin.) It’s the endless process of learning who to trust, what to respect.

Interrogating icons requires not insolence but information. You often see colossal ignorance displayed in criticisms of feminism from the 1970s. That movement was forged against a massive campaign of ridicule in media & now is being vilified as racist prudes by those who want to destroy & divide feminism along generational & ethnic lines rather than honest critique. Along with freedom to question, the young have to do their homework.

Choosing political leadership is not the same as selecting gurus or spiritual counselors. It’s a rugged process wrought in struggle & quite frankly those who never get off their asses but write criticisms from their easy chairs should learn to zip it. (Armchair rebels illustrate the only place in politics where humility is a virtue.) That process was played out in spades in the Egyptian uprising & now in the emerging civil rights movement. Leadership is the question of questions in social transformation. Who & whose program do we trust?

The politics of social transformation is not a place where tenure serves. Anyone who’s ever sat in an assembly of octogenarian leftists knows the full brunt of that truth. Those who marinate fifty years in sectarianism & factionalism do not improve with age but only grow more belligerent. And they are proof that nothing & no one is sacred in the process of understanding what is to be done. If the young don’t question, mistakes are not corrected. There isn’t a single case where obedience & deference served justice.

You can’t tell me UN ambassador Samantha Power & John Kerry aren’t the same person. Or at least separated at birth. You could really see it before Kerry started pumping his face full of Botox. But when they open their mouthes, it’s unmistakeable. Arrogance & stupidity combine like peas in a pod.