This past Saturday, Dr. Wei Jiang, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, left on a trip to China-where she will provide volunteer psychiatric care to earthquake survivors.
For two weeks, Jiang will lead a group of four researchers who will be the first medical team to provide international psychiatric care to survivors of the earthquake that struck China's Sichuan province in May. The team will include Jian Chen, former president of Durham's Chinese-American Friendship Association, Glen Xiong, a psychiatrist from the University of California-Davis and Yin Song, a biomechanical engineer.
The earthquake, which left 69,000 casualties, 17,000 missing, 375,000 injured and 5 million Chinese homeless, likely had a profound psychological impact on many Chinese citizens who are not receiving proper care, Jiang said.
"In China, there are only 17,000 [certified] psychiatrists, " she said. "That is one-tenth of what developed countries have in terms of a physician-patient ratio."
According to a proposal submitted by Jiang, the group has been informed that there are currently between 40,000 and 50,000 severely mentally ill patients who have not received treatment. If such patients are not treated, their diseases can last for a lifetime, negatively affect health and decrease life expectancy.
On its mission trip, the team hopes to accomplish four goals: provide medical care-mainly psychiatric-to earthquake victims, train local physicians and volunteers caring for survivors, conduct a survey to comprehend the psychological impact of the disaster and determine the triggers for post-traumatic psychiatric problems for particular individuals.
Part of the project will be to see how receptive the Chinese citizens will be to foreigners providing mental health assistance, Jiang said. In a culture with a history of repressing emotions and stigmatizing psychological illnesses, disaster survivors may be more resistant to mental health care than their Western counterparts.
"I'm interested to see how the Chinese have come to express and accept their mental health states," Song said. "In the [United States], we all know people who see therapists, but in China it's different. There's a lot of social dynamics from how China was built up pre-Cultural Revolution times."
As China has modernized-and Westernized-Jiang said both the people and the government have become more accepting of mental illnesses and better at coping with natural disasters in general. In both cases, the main problem lies within China's limited infrastructure and resources, Jiang said.
"I think the Chinese government had done a marvelous job this time," Jiang added, referring to how the government dealt with the repercussions of the earthquake. "The rescue system is still pretty infantile, but at least the government voices that this needs to be refined and enhanced."
Jiang said the group has essentially received a "green light" from top and local government officials to carry out the project, and has been pleased with the entire process of getting the project approved. The Chinese Embassy in the United States, the local Chinese government of the Sichuan province and the Chinese Ministry of Health, as well as the local hospitals have all welcomed the group.
Part of the reason the Duke Medical team is so qualified for the task is that all of the members are native Chinese speakers, Jiang added.
"Because we all speak Chinese we feel we can communicate directly to patients' hearts without going through an intepreter where things can be twisted in between," Jiang said.
The group will first work at Sichuan University's Huaxi Hospital, one of the largest hospitals in western China, and then train medical staff and volunteers in refugee camps.
In total, Jiang said the team will probably perform around 1,000-1,500 direct interventions. Treatment would include medicine, psychotherapy and social intervention.
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