A/Prof. Chee Ng's (Co-Director, AAMH) Speech
Asialink Stakeholders' Cocktail Function
Thursday 29th May, 2008
"Beyond Blue’s research states that 1 in 5 people will suffer a mental illness of some sort during their lives. For a population of 20 million this comes as shocking news but in a country of 1.3 billion people such as China, the statistics are staggering.
In some Asian communities, people with mental disorders are tied or chained. Others are marginalised, discriminated against or at worst locked up in prisons. In many psychiatric institutions and hospitals, patients face gross deprivations.
Asia-Australia Mental Health’s vision is for people with mental health problems to receive dignified and effective care rather than suffer in shame alone.
Our work in China supports a brave young team of mental health professionals who manage China’s National Centre of Mental Health. We are working with them to train a mental health workforce and establish practical procedures to deliver a patient centred community based mental health service throughout China in 30 provinces.
AAMH was in Wuhan last week to deliver a three-day national training program for 200+ mental health professionals in community based service. Our friend, Jenny Wong had agreed to be part of our team and to support us with her insights and rich experience.
Of course no one could have predicted, just days before our arrival, the devastating earthquake that claimed more than 60,000 lives in Sichuan Province. Nearly 6000 orphans are without family and thousands of parents lost their only child. Our planned training program was quickly adapted to include mental health disaster training.
Co-incidentally our close-knit Australia-China team was already working together on a mental health first aid program for children in the last year. After the tsunami, we realised that children’s mental health needs were being neglected. More importantly there was nothing produced for an Asian context.
In 2007 we trained a young inexperienced group of mental health professionals into a confident knowledgeable team ready to take leadership in crises. All the members of our original Chinese team, except for two, are now working in Sichuan.
Together we wrote simple guidelines for parents, teachers and other community members to protect children physically and mentally traumatised by disasters.
We felt enormously proud that within 2 days of the disaster occurring, our materials appeared on the Chinese Ministry of Health’s official website. The program material is most highly accepted and the best received one in Sichuan now. 50,000 copies of the key information are out, another 60,000 copies are the way to Sichuan.
Our team members are taking leadership roles in Sichuan and we have been asked to work with our Chinese partners on developing a much larger capacity building strategy in disaster mental health. But much more effort is needed to realise this.
Jenny Wong provided moral support, encouragement and kept the team sustained through the week. Jenny, on behalf of the Ang Family is also donating most generously to our program and have pledged $50,000 per annum to our program as well as providing funding for land cost in China for our team. We thank you Jenny for your amazing foresight and kindness."