We may only hope

Over the past two weeks, I have been showing my oral students Lars and the Real Girl, a quirky combination of romance, comedy, and drama. It's about Lars, a man whose loneliness and lack of social skills cause him to suffer a delusion -- he starts dating a life-sized doll.  To complicate things, the trauma of his mother dying during childbirth continues to affect him.  We watched this movie as a culmination of our love and relationships unit (great culmination, I know!), but really, our discussions have been more focused on mental health and how people should treat each other.  Mental health resources are lacking in China, where a culture of shame causes many people to hide, be hidden, or never receive proper treatment.

Our movie discussions have been successful, but yesterday I dreaded facing one of my classes, where the topic of mental health hit too close to home.  The white elephant in the room was my absent student CS, whose loneliness and lack of social skills are related to his depressive disorder.  CS attempted to commit suicide last week.  It seems that he was never able to recover from the trauma of his father's suicide in 2000.  I don't know where he is now, I only know that he has left school.  He was an excellent English student, though a little strange, and he tended to sit away from the others.  When no one else had anything to say, CS got a plus for participation.  Of my several hundred students, he was that kid who always emailed me long and rambling messages that I didn't really know how best to respond to.  Unfortunately I wasn't aware of his depression until the beginning of the spring semester, when he started to miss class. 

The discussion was lively in all my other class, but in CS's class, the atmosphere was a bit more subdued.  Nobody mentioned CS.  One of the quotes in the movie that I had picked out was Lars' older brother, saying "He's gonna love that thing his whole life, and it's all my fault."  We talked about blame and responsibility.  Some students felt that yes, it was the brother's fault, he should have taken better care of Lars; others felt that that it was nobody's fault, just the situation.  Then I pushed them a little harder.  Could we hold Lars responsible for his problems?  Should he have tried harder to interact with people?  One girl, Katherine, stood up and said that Lars was responsible.  He was given a lot of chances, and he didn't take them.  I know from someone else in the class (my only freshman student I feel comfortable counting as a friend, since we are the same age and he is an international student), that Katherine had implored CS to "come back to us," but that CS had refused, saying it was too late.  Later in the discussion, we talked about the fact that Lars had a delusion, and maybe that caused him to feel physical pain when people touched him.  Another student stood up and explained that Lars was depressed, and that was the reason for this reaction.

Maybe for all of us, Lars and CS had silently merged into the same person.  But Lars had a happy ending.  He came out of his delusion, he no longer felt pain when people touched him, he accepted his brother's apology, and he met a real girl.  CS may not be so lucky.  I am afraid that he has been swallowed up by the strange, confusing, and massive organism that is his motherland, and he will be spit out, another sad statistic.  We may never know, we may only hope.