Mental health centers in China's largest city Shanghai have started to introduce a "mock community" system in rehabilitation wards for mentally disabled patients, to help them learn basic communication and survival skills in a simulated society.

"With the coordination of psychological consultative workers and medical workers, we built up an environment in which there are mock stores, public phone booths and family kitchens, to enable our patients to learn how to lead a social life inside the hospital," said Jiang Kaida, director of the Shanghai Mental Health Clinical Center.

"These kinds of wards are mainly intended to help seriously mentally disabled patients in the stage of rehabilitation," said Jiang, adding that 30 patients in his center were receiving the new therapy.

In the past, wards in China's psychiatric institutions were mostly in a "closed and isolated environment", which effectively reduced the mortality rate of mental patients but fell short of helping them develop survival skills. Up to 30 percent of serious schizophrenic patients still cannot survive in society after receiving treatment.

In the "open-style" mock community wards, patients had a better chance to learn some basic communicative and survival skills, experts said.

According to statistics from the World Health Organization, mental patients account for some 11 percent of the people seeking medical assistance worldwide. At present, China has about 16 million people suffering from serious mental diseases, while there are over 90,000 of registered mental patients in Shanghai alone.

(Xinhua News Agency  January 29, 2004)