Hong Kong secondary school student Chan Chun* was 14 when he first thought of taking his life. At home, he witnessed his father beating his two older brothers, police arriving to stop them fighting, and his distressed mother being sent to hospital after taking sleeping pills with alcohol. When his brothers dropped out of school, his parents pinned all their hopes on him to perform better.
“They wanted me to study well and go to university, but I found no meaning in it and had no idea what I was doing at school,” recalled Chun, now 16 and in Form Five. It made him physically ill. He suffered bouts of dizziness and had a stomachache often.
He spent many nights crying himself to sleep. “I wanted to escape all these miseries and troubles, I wanted to kill myself, but I had to stay with my mum, whom I love the most,” he told the Post. Youth mental health has been in the spotlight in Hong Kong as the suicide rate for young people hit a record high, with a cluster of suicides and attempted ones occurring after the school year began last September.
The Hong Kong Jockey Club Centre for Suicide Research and Prevention at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) sounded the alarm in early November last year, after recording 22 suicide attempts between August and October, double the number over the same period in 2022. Its provisional data showed that the suicide rate for those aged 15 to 24 had already almost doubled to 12.2 deaths per 100,000 people in 2022 from 6.
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