Comment | Replacing daughter's antidepressant with vitamins reflects the urgent need to improve public health literacy

"The mother stopped giving her daughter antidepressants and replaced them with vitamins" reflects the urgent need to improve public health literacy. Depression is a disease, but unfortunately many people have misunderstandings about it. Paying attention to the mental health of teenagers requires a "health literacy" prescription for the whole society >>

Written by reporter Lv Bingxin

Recently, a piece of news about a mother stopping her daughter's antidepressant medication and replacing it with vitamins became a hot topic, sparking heated public discussion. According to media reports, a girl in Hangzhou was not able to adapt to the transition from primary school to junior high school, and her grades plummeted. Her parents thought that her child's aversion to school was "acting out". In the third year of junior high school, the girl had already shown suicidal tendencies. After seeing a doctor, the mother even arbitrarily stopped the antidepressant medication that the child needed to take regularly and replaced it with vitamin tablets.

In response to this, many netizens commented that "just reading the title makes me suffocate." From a scientific point of view, in addition to standardized treatment, taking medication on time, and completing a systematic course of treatment, family support and scientific knowledge of depression are also crucial to overcoming depression. From the perspective of the little girl, depression is a great psychological and physical loss, and the lack of understanding from her parents is probably even worse. From the perspective of her parents, I believe their starting point is also "for the good of the child", but at its core, they did something bad with good intentions due to a lack of basic health literacy.

Health literacy refers to the ability of an individual to obtain and understand basic health information and services, and use this information and services to make correct decisions to maintain and promote their own health. According to disclosed data, the health literacy level of Chinese residents in 2021 was 25.40%, which means that for every 100 people aged 15 to 69, 75 people do not yet have basic health literacy, do not understand basic health knowledge and concepts, do not master healthy behavior lifestyles and behavioral content, and do not have basic health skills.

The various rumors that are rampant on the Internet have further devoured the public's health literacy, which still needs to be improved. "Depression is just hypocrisy", "Depression does not require medication, just think it over", "Antidepressants are addictive"... further exacerbated the gap between people with depression and society. First of all, it should be made clear that depression is a disease. It is not an ordinary bad mood, nor can it be solved by going out to relax and think more open-mindedly. The disease requires professional and standardized help and treatment. The "2022 National Depression Blue Book" pointed out that people under the age of 18 in my country account for 30% of the total population of depression; 50% of people with depression are students in school, and the prevalence of depression in adolescents has reached 15%~20%, which means that 1.5~2 out of every 10 teenagers can be diagnosed with depression.

Unfortunately, from the recent Hu Xinyu case to the incident where the little girl's parents stopped taking antidepressants, it still reflects the lack of health literacy among some Chinese people. Facing the "elephant in the room", in addition to the teenagers themselves, parents also need to learn to identify and recognize depression, strengthen the study of psychology-related knowledge, and correctly view depression from a scientific perspective. Only when children feel truly understood and respected can they achieve better treatment results and recover faster.

The "Healthy China Action" mentioned that the level of health literacy of residents will be raised to 30% by 2030. We must face up to the fact that the current gap still exists. Looking back at the period when the COVID-19 pandemic was raging, people fully realized the necessity and importance of scientific literacy, and to a certain extent, the public's health awareness was improved. For example, after in-depth popularization of science by health, disease control, and the media, three years ago you may not have known how to wear a mask correctly or how to use alcohol for disinfection, but now these health knowledge have become "basic operations" that everyone has mastered. However, it is worth emphasizing that the topic of paying attention to and improving public health literacy should not be "cooled down" as the epidemic situation improves.

In the face of depression and other adolescent mental health problems, the whole society also needs to work together to increase the dissemination of psychological knowledge through flexible, diverse and easy-to-understand popular science forms, improve the public's mental health literacy, and slow down the rising trend of mental-related diseases. It enables adolescents and families to correctly understand common emotional problems, improve mental health awareness, use scientific methods to relieve stress, pay attention to sleep health, cultivate scientific exercise habits, and seek help in time when psychological and behavioral problems occur. In the future, I hope that in addition to the heavy topic of adolescent depression, some secondary disasters caused by ignorance and misunderstanding can be reduced.

Produced by: Science Central Kitchen

Produced by: Beijing Science and Technology News | Beijing Science and Technology Media

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