Most of those who like to “spread rumors” are mostly for attracting attention and making money, thus pouring out the greatest malicious imagination, and they don’t even know what depression is.
1
This “super suspense drama” spanning 106 days finally came to an end.
On February 2, 2023, the joint working group of Jiangxi Province, cities, and counties held a press conference in Qianshan County, Shangrao City, to report on the investigation of the Hu Mouyu incident.
The press conference reported that on October 14, 2022, Hu Mouyu, a first-year student at Zhiyuan Middle School in Qianshan County, went missing. After the incident, relevant departments and all parties were organized to continuously carry out investigation and search work. On January 28, 2023, Hu Mouyu’s body was found. Under the on-site guidance of domestic authoritative criminal technology experts, the joint working group conducted investigation visits, on-site inspections, autopsy, and physical evidence inspection and identification, and determined that Hu Mouyu died by hanging himself, and the place where the body was found was the original first scene.
▲ Hu Xinyu incident press conference (Picture/Network)
Hu Mouyu is the well-known Hu Xinyu, a 15-year-old high school student. The Hu Xinyu case, which has been missing for more than a hundred days, has touched the hearts of millions and become the focus of attention.
The last question at the press conference came from a reporter from Hangzhou Metropolitan Express Orange News Interactive, involving psychological counseling for students.
The relevant leaders of the Qianshan County Education and Sports Bureau replied: In the next step, we will pay more attention to the care of students, establish an early warning network, improve the ability of head teachers, subject teachers, and parents to identify psychological obstacles, and achieve early detection, early warning, and early intervention, especially to do a good job in psychological counseling for key groups of students, and reduce the impact of various unfavorable factors on children’s mental health.
This question and answer, facing students and the future, is valuable.
▲ Orange News reporter’s on-site question at the press conference (Picture/Network)
However, it is far from enough to stay at the level of “psychological problems”, but more of mental health problems, which are student depression problems.
Do you know that tens of thousands of middle school students in our country commit suicide due to depression every year?
2
The Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences releases the “China National Mental Health Development Report” every two years, which is an important mental health blue book, and the 2023 version has not yet been released.
The previous “China National Mental Health Development Report (2019-2020)” (published by the Social Sciences Literature Press in March 2021) shows that: in 2020, the detection rate of depression among Chinese adolescents was 24.6%, of which mild depression was 17.2% and severe depression was 7.4%.
The detection rate of severe depression in high school is between 10.9% and 12.5%. This means that more than one-tenth of high school students have severe depression.
Picture/Tuchong Creative
On June 29, 2022, the People’s Daily Health Client, Health Times, the Depression Research Institute, and other units jointly released the “2022 China Depression Blue Book”. The blue book analyzed a large amount of data through user surveys, literature research, and expert evaluation. The data shows: Currently, there are 95 million people in China suffering from depression, and about 280,000 people commit suicide every year, of which 40% suffer from depression, and the recurrence rate of depression is as high as 72%.
Among the group of patients with depression, 50% are students, of which 41% have dropped out of school due to depression, and 46% of students with depression have not sought any help. Among them, patients with depression under the age of 18 account for 30% of the total number of people; 50% of patients with depression are students.
The “China Youth Development Report” released by the China Youth Research Center in 2021 shows that among adolescents under the age of 17 in China, 30 million people are troubled by various emotional and psychological behavioral problems.
Research data shows that the suicide rate of adolescents is nearly 3 times higher than that of adults, and about 60% of adolescent suicide incidents are related to depression.
Many media, such as “Life Times”, reported that “According to the “China Children’s Suicide Report” released by the Beijing Medical Children’s Development Center, about 100,000 adolescents die by suicide every year.” Among adolescent suicides, middle school students account for about 51%, that is, more than 50,000 middle school students die by suicide, and the main reason is depression.
Calculating with more than 50,000 middle school students committing suicide every year, the average is 137 middle school students committing suicide every day, nearly 6 middle school students committing suicide every hour, that is, 1 middle school student committing suicide every 10 minutes. This is a very harsh reality.
This also shows that suicide by middle school students due to depression is a cruel “high-probability event”. Hu Xinyu is only “one in ten thousand”.
It should be noted that there are currently no accurate statistics on the number of suicides due to depression in the world, and these are all research data.
Picture/Tuchong Creative
The larger background data is: the Chinese Mental Health Survey shows that the lifetime prevalence of adult depressive disorders in China is 6.8%, of which depression is 3.4%. The World Health Organization statistics show that about 1 billion people worldwide are suffering from mental disorders, and one person dies by suicide every 40 seconds.
After the COVID-19 pandemic, the burden of mental disorders worldwide has become heavier, with the number of cases of severe depression and anxiety increasing by 28% and 26% respectively, and the number of patients with depression soaring by 53 million, an increase of 27.6%.
In the process of searching for Hu Xinyu, if the body was found on the second day of his disappearance, then “nothing would have happened”, which is exactly the same as the “silent” of tens of thousands of middle school students who committed suicide every year.
Depression, especially adolescent depression, must attract the high attention of the whole society!
3
I have been studying depression from a social perspective for more than ten years and have published many articles, including the article “Facing Adolescent Depression” published in August 2019. At that time, the hit drama “A Little Reunion” on Zhejiang Satellite TV was broadcast, and the plot of the student heroine Qiao Yingzi suffering from depression was shocking. I said: “‘A Little Reunion’ faces adolescent depression, which is the most meritorious.”
Picture/Stills from “A Little Reunion”
In response to student depression, the Ministry of Education replied to the proposal of the CPPCC members “on further implementing measures for the prevention and treatment of adolescent depression” in November 2021, which clearly stated: including depression screening in the content of students’ health checkups, establishing students’ psychological health files, assessing students’ psychological health status, and giving special attention to students with abnormal assessment results, etc.
I said at the time that it is necessary for individuals, families, schools, and education functional departments to pay attention in all aspects; however, it is very inadequate and problematic to regard depression as a “mental health” problem without recognizing it as a “mental illness” problem.
Depression is not just a simple “bad mood” or “psychological problem”, but is essentially a physiological disease and a genetic disease.
In the future, our education should be oriented to life and health, especially the “mental health” problem.
Life education should first educate schools, educators, and teachers, because they are very scarce in this aspect of concepts and concepts, especially depression, which seriously affects the physical health and life safety of children, but not many teachers have the correct knowledge of depression.
Similarly, many parents do not understand their children, it is more difficult to understand their children, and they do not know their children’s psychological and mental illnesses, and they do not know what depression is.
Hu Xinyu, who suffered from depression, should have been treated in the hospital, but in fact, nothing happened. Hu Xinyu’s symptoms are typical manifestations of depression:
“Can’t sleep well”—insomnia, difficulty falling asleep, early waking, difficulty falling asleep again after waking up, unwillingness to get up, etc.
“Can’t eat well”—loss of appetite, reduced food intake
“Lack of energy”—difficulty concentrating, difficulty remembering, poor grades in many courses, or even at the bottom
“Sense of hopelessness”—often lying in bed in a daze, writing painful and negative words in books and notebooks, such as “vomiting, it’s really hard to adapt to the new environment, my introverted personality is really annoying”, etc.
“Sense of helplessness”—loneliness and pain, not getting the help they deserve, whether from teachers or parents
For example, on September 27, 2022, he had three calls with his mother, totaling 43 minutes and 54 seconds, crying that he didn’t want to study and wanted to go home, but his mother didn’t understand “what depression is” at all, and missed the opportunity to let the child drop out of school for medical treatment.
▲ Hu Xinyu’s notes (Picture/Network)
More importantly, it is the two recordings left by Hu Xinyu through a voice recorder before his suicide, which clearly expressed the idea of suicide, “I am a little unclear today, and now I really want to die, I feel that it is meaningless”.
You must know that repeatedly thinking about suicide is the most typical manifestation of severe depression.
It is really a pity that if the parents or relevant teachers had the basic knowledge of depression, Hu Xinyu could have been completely saved, because depression is reversible, and it can be completely cured by taking the right medicine or even being hospitalized.
4
In the course of the case, I have said many times that Hu Xinyu was likely to commit suicide because of severe depression. As for the rumors of “homicide”, the probability is not non-existent, but extremely small.
For any event, before a conclusion is reached, “probability thinking” is an important logical thinking. Taking the extremely small probability event “seriously”, it is often not a “reason”.
Those who believe in “conspiracy theories” do not seriously study the various typical manifestations of Hu Xinyu’s depression, including the “negative and pessimistic” words he wrote one after another, but instead accept a large amount of information fed by “conspiracy theories”, shut themselves in an “information cocoon”, and thus increasingly believe that there is a major conspiracy behind it.
Due to the general lack of credibility, the “Tacitus Trap” is getting bigger and bigger. No matter whether the public power does good or bad things, tells the truth or lies, the public believes that you are doing bad things and telling lies.
The “Tacitus Trap” also gives “conspiracy theories” a wider and wider space.
“Watching promotes progress”, we cannot blame the onlookers for questioning, it is not okay and impossible without questioning, and continuous questioning has also greatly promoted the attention to the case; however, the excessive interpretation, fabrication of rumors, and nonsense of “conspiracy theories” are rampant, which is not a real question.
Some “celebrities” said nonsense, saying that they sent people to Shanghai overnight and took several hundred million to get the “parts” from him. This is really without any common sense and makes people laugh.
Most of those who like to “spread rumors” are mostly for attracting attention and making money, thus pouring out the greatest malicious imagination, and they don’t even know what depression is.
5
Unfortunately, our “information release soft power” is generally extremely poor, especially in the education system and the political and legal system, not to mention a county-level place like Qianshan, Jiangxi.
The press conference mentioned that “we visited the granary and searched the interior of all buildings, and also searched the abandoned factory building of the glass factory next to the granary, but the place where Hu Xinyu’s body was hanged was located in the forest area of about 9,300 square meters in the courtyard, and it was not searched.”
This kind of basically abandoned, but not completely abandoned, with only a few people on duty and a huge area of the “grain depot” courtyard, is exactly the “best” place for a person to commit suicide and be difficult to be found.
▲ From the vicinity of the dormitory building where Hu Xinyu lived, a distant view of the forest of the granary where his body was found. (Picture/Network)
But the known information was not clearly stated in the previous report of “finding the hanging”, and even the “granary” was not mentioned, which is a serious problem of “not being able to convince the public”.
And at this press conference, the keyword “depression” did not appear, which is also unimaginable.
This press conference should have been attended by a medical expert (a forensic doctor is also fine) who is familiar with depression to introduce in detail Hu Xinyu’s various abnormal performances and the related situation of depression, instead of officials talking from beginning to end.
The information release is not comprehensive, not timely, not accurate, and not in place, which also makes the “Tacitus Trap” deeper and deeper.
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