Mentally Ill Man Caged For Decade In China
A mother tells of her torment over keeping her schizophrenic son, 42, locked behind bars for more than a decade.
3:12pm Monday 27 May 2013
Wang Muxiang (R) passes food to her son Wu Yuanhong (L) through the cage
A mentally ill Chinese man has reportedly been kept in a cage for more than a decade by his family after he beat a child to death.
Images show Wu Yuanhong sitting on blankets in the narrow enclosure at his home in Lijiachong village in Ruichang, his feet shackled with a heavy chain and wearing only a T-shirt and his underwear.
The 42-year-old is given three meals a day by his mother Wang Muxiang, who provides her son with a pan when he needs to go to the toilet.
He was diagnosed as a schizophrenic at the age of 15 and in 2001 he beat a 13-year-old to death, the Information Daily newspaper said on its website.
Judicial authorities in Jiangxi province released him a year later as his illness meant he was not legally responsible for his actions, it said.
He was placed in shackles after his release, but his mother built the cage after he escaped and walked around his home village scaring local residents, the report said.
The family built a stronger structure to hold him after he got out again.
"My son may be insane, and beat someone to death, but he's still my son," the paper quoted the mother saying.
"To use my own hands to place him in a cage was very hard to take, like being stabbed with a knife.
"Every time I delivered food, I would sit at his cage and cry. Now my tears are dried up," she added.
Many mentally ill people in China go without proper treatment due to a lack of resources and qualified professionals, particularly in the countryside.
The Ministry of Health said in 2010 that there were only about 20,000 psychiatrists to serve the country's population of 1.35 billion, the state-run China Daily reported.
Authorities estimated in 2009 that about 170 million people had some form of mental illness, while more than 16 million suffered from severe mental health problems.
The Information Daily quoted local officials as saying they had supported the family with donations of oil and rice, adding Jiangxi had launched limited subsidies for poor families with mentally ill relatives.
No independent confirmation of the circumstances was immediately available to AFP news agency.
