If a man works 12 hours a day, seven days a week, is despised
and poorly paid, has no stable relationships, entertainment or
social life, what will happen to him?
A mental breakdown?
This is the sad reality of many of China's 100 million rural
migrant workers who have come to urban areas such as Beijing and
Shanghai in search of employment.
Experts attending the recently ended 28th International Congress
of Psychology are appealing for additional attention to be paid to
this psychologically vulnerable group as China's fast-developing
urban areas take shape.
Each year, 15 million farmers leave their lands and flock to the
cities for jobs. While they represent the backbone of the
construction labor that is transforming China's very core, they
often live on the fringes of urban life.
"They live in isolation - far from families, no community
support, suffering discrimination from urban neighbors and with no
relationships. This will probably cause emotional breakdowns," said
Wang Chun'guang, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social
Sciences.
According to Chen Bing, an experienced psychiatrist at Beijing's
Anding Hospital, rural migrants are vulnerable to cultural shock,
unfair treatment and hard travel to distant cities.
Some migrant workers also suffer from sex-based psychosis. A
survey of 1,900 migrant workers in Shenzhen, the prosperous city in
South China's Guangdong Province, indicated that more than 50
percent have sexual difficulties and more than 20 percent have
visited prostitutes.
While no accurate estimates exist about how many rural migrants
have psychiatric problems, Zhang Zhiqiang, a 36-year-old migrant
from Sichuan Province working on a construction site, described the
life led by people like himself as one of "loneliness, anxiety and
depression - these are problems of urban people but the everyday
reality for us."
According to Chen, few rural migrants will go for therapy
because they cannot afford it. They usually buy the cheapest drugs
and endure their strong side effects.
Wang blamed the isolation on the absence of community and public
life, but he said the government's training programs for the
migrant workers partly eases the situation.
However, Zhang said mere governmental efforts are far from
enough.
"We ourselves should build communities to offer help for the
suffering," Zhang said.
He works part-time for a non-governmental organization providing
counseling for rural migrants. The organization also holds lectures
on city laws and regulations and provides training in English as a
second language.
However, such organizations face on-going registration
problems.
"We should and are able to solve some problems by ourselves. We
wish the government could give us more support, however," Zhang
said.
(China Daily August 16, 2004)