School phobia underscores mental health of Chinese children

For some, school oscillates between mind-numbing boredom and awkward encounters – in short, a place to be avoided. With the new semester starting soon after Spring Festival ends in China, it seems that this reluctance is playing out for many students.

Don’t make me go there

After the end of a semester and before the next, there are a good number of children with “school refusal disorder,” Dr Zhang Yiwen of Shanghai Children’s Medical Center told The Paper.

Children with the disorder fear and may even detest school, often showing physical symptoms such as headache, nausea and stomachache. A 12-year-old boy in central China sparked online debate back in 2014 when he fainted on a bus on the first day of the school year. He was diagnosed with the disorder after his mother took him to the hospital.

Sometimes, symptoms of anxiety will disappear in as quickly as a day when a child stays home from school.

The condition has been recognized since the 1960s, but skeptics say students who don’t want to go to school are simply truants. However, young people with the disorder are “typically well behaved,” while truants skip school because they want to engage in delinquent behavior, says Nigel Blagg, a psychologist who has written a book on the subject, in an interview with the Guardian.