Title: A mental health workforce crisis in China: A pre-existing treatment gap coping with the COVID-19 pandemic challenges（Asian Journal of Psychiatry，2020, 54）
Text：On 17th Apr 2020, the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics released news that China’s economy shrank 6.8 % in the first quarter of 2020 compared to the previous year. This signals that thee road toward recovery will likely be long. Risks to mental health come not only from the COVID-19 pandemic (Tandon, 2020; Rajkumar, 2020), but also the consequences of the economic downturn. Unemployment and lost income can be expected among marganizalized and disadvantaged such as the migrant workers (Liem et al., 2020a). Rural citizens are another significant group of vulnerable people. They have already lost income for months, in addition to losses to their initial agricultural investment, since roads were blocked causing no access to buy feed for their livestock. These groups of people are likely to encounter high level of psychological burden, as they may have less savings, let alone protection against financial catastrophe. Loss of employment and financial stressors are well-recognised risk factors for suicide (Nordt, Warnke & Seifritz et al., 2015). As the vicious circle of pychological distress and income inequality continues, online counseling services for people affected by the COVID-19 crisis will be needed (Dan, 2020), but they may be far from sufficient (Liem et al., 2020b). On top of the large preexisting treatment gap, China might face a mental health workforce crisis.
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