It's a mind field
A lack of government regulation and the city's small pool of psychologists is cause for concern, say associations
It was once taboo to talk about depression, mood disorders, and mental health issues in general in Chinese culture. However, in recent years, a growing number of people in Hong Kong have been seeking professional help from clinical psychologists.
Yet this city seems woefully unprepared. To start, there are simply not enough qualified professionals to cope with demand. Of the two institutions training psychologists, University of Hong Kong has just 20 vacancies every two years, while Chinese University offers 19 places annually. This means that only about 30 trained clinical psychologists graduate every year.
A broader picture can be gained by looking at Britain, where there is one clinical psychologist for every 5,000 citizens, according to the British Psychological Society. To be on a level pegging, Hong Kong would need 1,400 such professionals, but there are only 400 registered with the city's two professional groups, says Dr Sammy Cheng Kin-wing, a former chairman of the Hong Kong Psychological Society, Division of Clinical Psychology (HKPS-DCP).
"People who seek psychological services need to ask a medical doctor or a social worker for referral to a clinical psychologist who is in a hospital," Cheng says.
Some people may wait a year for their first hospital appointment, he adds, although there is a system to prioritise high-risk cases. "But even a low-risk case waiting for a year can become high risk."
To complicate matters, the profession is not regulated by the government. This concerns members of the HKPS-DCP and its twin organisation, the Hong Kong Clinical Psychologists Association (HKCPA), which have been lobbying the government for 30 years to regulate the profession to no avail. Problems can arise, they warn, when psychologists opt out of the groups' practise of self-regulation and set up their own private practices, specialising in areas such as child psychology and forensic psychology.
"Some countries, such as the US, emphasise diversity and welcome early specialisation, but in Hong Kong there is more comprehensive training because it is a small place, so psychologists should have overall training," Cheng says.