Sometimes I worry that Internet video sites encourage this kind of behavior — not on the part of the woman in the video, but of the paike who followed her through the streets of Shenzhen yesterday and shot her with what appears to have been a cellphone camera. The point of our posting it here isn’t so we can all laugh at the crazy person. Not sure what the point really is, but I know that ain’t it.

Having lived much of my life in the States, my sense has always been that one simply encounters less overt mental illness in China than in America. (Admittedly, four years in Berkeley really skews one’s sample). It may be, as some have suggested, that there’s a stronger familial safety net here. It may also be that China tends to institutionalize — even incarcerate — its mentally ill more readily than the U.S. does. In any case, the rare sight of someone in China completely losing his or her shit in public is evidently enough to compel people to whip out whatever video devices they happen to be carrying. Remember this video? The poor woman in complete anguish over missing a flight from Hong Kong to San Francisco is in hysterics, it turns out, because her sister is on her deathbed and she’s afraid she won’t ever see her again.

In case you’re wondering, toward the end of the video, the paike asks her why she’s throwing bricks at cars, and she answers that the cars contain poisonous gasses. To his credit, he demonstrates some compassion; he urges her not to keep doing it — that she’ll get in all sorts of trouble.

Comments are generally along lines of, “Why hasn’t isn’t anyone doing anything about her?” or “Why hasn’t anyone called the cops?” But there are also a number of sympathetic comments, speculating that some guy must have done wrong by her.