China has a complex history in the treatment of the mentally ill. In 1849, the first mental institutions in the country were founded by Western missionaries. One of them, Dr. John G. Kerr, instituted some principles that are even valid today. Among those principles were the following: mentally ill patients shouldn't be blamed for their actions; those that were hospitalized are not in a prison but in a hospital and should be treated as human beings, not as animals.
During the Cultural Revolution there were changes that led to strong political control, over-diagnosis and treatment — a change that overshadowed patients' real needs. Many mentally ill patients were sent to labor camps because of their "counterrevolutionary behavior." Western models of treatment were gradually introduced only after the reforms advocated by Deng Xiaoping. Today, however, serious problems remain such as a high number of untreated mentally ill people, inadequate services and a lack of trained personnel.
The spectrum of mental illness is broad, and includes minor conditions such as anxiety and depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder and other problems that may lead to drug addiction and serious crimes. In 2009, the World Health Organization (WHO) stated that mental illness — which affected seven percent of the population — had overtaken heart disease and cancer as the biggest burden on China's health care system