Page 16 - ABILITY Magazine -Cedric Yarbrough Issue

his case, they concluded that Jiajue did suffer from a mental illness, but they didn’t know which one.”
Xiewei was just three when his father was killed during the Nanjing Massacre by Japanese troops in 1937, leaving his mother and six siblings to experience many hardships. He was in high school when the Korean War broke out and entered the army. He was assigned to Shenyang China Medical University where he served as Party branch sec- retary. Due to his excellent academics, he was assigned to the Shanghai Second Military Medical University in 1956, where he served as a lieutenant. Originally thinking it was a good opportunity, he was later labeled a rightist within the party, and from Shanghai was reassigned to the remote Guangxi region in 1957. This was the reason he and his girlfriend of six years broke up. In Guangxi, Xiewei taught himself architecture, began designing mental hospi- tals and later met his current wife, Meijin Liu.
In the eyes of Xiewei and fellow psychiatric experts Desen Yang and Xiehe Liu, Jiajue’s symptoms were obvious: “After the murder, he left the corpses in his closet and proceeded to nap and rest. During his trial, he can be seen displaying various types of funny faces. Based on these behaviors, they suspected he was suffer- ing from schizophrenia.” Xiewei can still remember Jia- jue’s sister crying and pleading to her younger sibling during the trial, “Brother, you must fight for an appeal!” But Jiajue decided not to appeal. “He felt he was not worthy of life after murdering others and completely lost his ability to protect himself,” said Xiewei. Because Jiajue had no idea how to save himself, his first trial ended quickly, and he was convicted and executed.
In the early 1960s, Xiewei and a handful of others became the first batch of China’s forensic doctors. “Our method is still too simple,” he admits. “The current rate of misdiag- noses is 10 percent. There are no objective standards nor avant-garde scientific and technological means, so it is difficult to identify whether a person is suffering from mental illness.” The industry is still improving. Those hospitalized with mental illness must be evaluated in three steps before a diagnosis is confirmed: first by the resident, then the attending physician and lastly the hospital direc- tor. For difficult cases, an expert is consulted. Because of the limited time given for these forensic psychiatric assessments to take place, only a short meeting is held. “I think it should be a hospitalized observation, at least half month or a month,” asserts Xiewei.
For the 2006 case of Xinghua Qiu, Xiewei spent the longest time away from home. Xinghua, a 47-year-old farmer suffering from delusions, was charged with mur- dering ten people, one of whom was only12 years old, at a Taoist temple in Shaanxi Province. He even cut out the heart of one of the Taoist monks, fried it, and then fed it to a dog. After burning the temple, Xinghua fled the scene. When Xiewei read the case files, he suspect- ed Xinghua suffered from paranoid psychosis, and this speculation coincided with Dr. Liu Xiehe’s diagnosis of “delusions of jealousy”. The day before the first trial started marked the 34th day in which Xiewei had been staying in Beijing on his own dime.
A Difficult Job
16 ABILITY