Fong Chan Kin-yee recalls with a hint of sadness the day her daughter plunged out of their fifth-storey Shek Kip Mei flat, in an unexpected and unsuccessful bid to end her life. The girl was just eight years old.
Mrs Fong remembers that her daughter had been worried about being neglected after the birth of her sister; she had also said she disliked doing homework.
'She was a bit unhappy but it did not seem out of the ordinary,' Mrs Fong says. The complaints of her daughter, now 12, were hardly the telltale signs of a potential suicide, but as one doctor put it: 'Suicides, no matter what age, are notoriously hard to predict.' Although Mrs Fong's daughter survived, an equally young, and apparently equally distressed, boy succeeded in taking his own life early last year after he was caught skipping school for two weeks. The eight-year-old is believed to be the youngest child to have committed suicide in Hong Kong.
On the mainland two years ago, there was a case involving an even younger child. A five-year-old boy made a fatal leap from his fifth-storey Beijing flat after watching a Japanese soldier carve out a child's heart on a television show commemorating the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II.
Although rare, children as young as five do attempt, and sometimes succeed in committing suicide.
Symptoms are difficult to detect, given that children are prone to erratic behaviour. Warning signals include threats of suicide, talk of death, depression, withdrawal, rebelliousness or running away, and changed eating patterns - behaviour that many parents would assume to be, and often is, common.
Suicidal children, both in overseas studies and his own experience, show a common trait, says Dr Lee Chi-chiu, a senior medical officer at the Yau Ma Tei Child Psychiatric Centre, part of Kwai Chung Hospital.
