Yang Yongxin

Who is Yang Yongxin?

Yang Yongxin is a highly controversial Chinese clinical psychiatrist who advocated and practiced electroconvulsive therapy as a cure for Internet addiction in teenagers. Yang is currently deputy chief of the Fourth Hospital of Linyi, a hospital in Linyi, Shandong province. Yang runs the Internet Addiction Treatment Center, a boot camp at Linyi Mental Hospital specializing in treating teenage Internet addiction.

According to media reports, the families of teenaged patients sent to the hospital paid CNY 5,500 per month for a treatment that employed psychiatric medication in addition to ECT, which Yang dubbed "xingnao" treatments. Yang treated nearly 3000 children with the therapy before the practice was banned by the Chinese Ministry of Health. Yang claimed that 96% of the patients treated by his electric therapy had shown improvement, a figure that was questioned by the Chinese media. After the ban, Yang has begun to use another therapeutic method he invented, known as "low-frequency pulse therapy", which is alleged by former patients to be more painful than ECT.