ABSTRACT
It has been more than a decade since Michael Phillips and his colleagues first disclosed the seriousness of suicide in China (Phillips et al. 1999). The characteristics of suicide in China are important. Ninety percent of suicides are rural and, unlike the US and Europe, there is a high percentage in young women. This may partly reflect the lethality of the way rural women make suicide attempts: drinking a vial of concentrated pesticide. Unless they are near a hospital, they die, even if they only meant to drink the poison as an act of desperation and a call for help. In most rural areas there are no suicide prevention interventions. Periodically, newspapers and party publications have tried to raise awareness of suicide prevention, but there has never been either a real national or even regional campaign. The state only released data on suicide in the late 1980s. Recently, the state seems to have become more sensitive to the issue of suicide and there seems to be a decline in openness and support for research and interventions. There have emerged some social efforts at suicide intervention, among them the suicide hotlines in Beijing, Shanghai, and some other cities, and “the relatives’ association” of the Beijing Hui Long Guan Hospital. Despite these preventative efforts, however, we cannot see an obvious decrease in the suicide rate. Among these programs, the one that lasted longest was that launched in 2002 by Rural Women, a non-governmental organization. In a certain sense, Rural Women touched the core of suicide in China and even successfully made several villages in which it launched programs immune from suicide. Nevertheless, due to the shortage of funds and the short focus of NGOs, it finally stopped its suicide program in 2008. I cooperated with Rural Women for a long time. Half a year after it launched its first program in Zhengding County, I contacted Ms. Xu Rong, their main figure responsible for the suicide program, and went to the village with her. In 2005, I evaluated its three-year program of suicide prevention among rural women. In 2008, I also evaluated its suicide intervention program among both women and men. In both cases, we surveyed the villagers. Hence I got the chance to understand their work. Now two years have passed since Rural Women finished its suicide prevention program, and it might be a good time to essay its success and failure.
