I’ve been getting photobook offers in my email inbox on a weekly basis, and they really are quite good deals; but somehow, “SALEbrate good times this month” just feels offensive. The audacity of sending out these promo blitz titles is startling. The past six months have been as boring as they have been nerve-wrecking . Every day consists of me narrating everything I am doing or seeing or thinking or just making, talking gibberish to a toddler who needs to – according to experts – hear 30,000 words spoken a day for verbal fluency skills. Without being able to attend classes that have been paid for, due to social distancing, the weight of those 30,000 words fall solely on us parents – no teacher or grandparent or aunt or uncle can help with diffusing that responsibility. And being a bilingual household, we’ll need to double the talking. That’s close to 11 million words in two languages that should have been spoken in the past six months. And since Covid-19 killed my son’s school, we had to scramble to find him a nursery spot elsewhere. We managed to do that, with the mask-adverse 18-month-old surviving “interviews”. That sense of accomplishment was the highlight of our 2020. We got the school textbooks and uniforms, and we basked in those fleeting but very real moments of normalcy until the third wave hit and schools shut again. And now, since face-to-face teaching and learning is out of the question, we are actively exploring the option of letting the tot sleep with his textbooks underneath his pillow – it’s the learning through osmosis philosophy we’re implementing in this household. Desperate times call for desperate measures. That’s what we have been telling ourselves, along with those who have been breaking out their bacon reserves , because there’s simply not enough bacon out there to bring home. We also tell ourselves we should consider ourselves lucky. Never have I embraced cognitive dissonance like this. We’ve all been grounded, our plans uprooted, and our sense of hope ridiculed by infection numbers and the death toll. Many of us have never before felt so vulnerable. Professor Eric Chen Yu-hai, head of the department of psychiatry at the University of Hong Kong, confirmed what most of us have suspected with the latest survey findings . “The overall mental health situation in Hong Kong is not good. We are in a very serious situation,” he said. The professor’s use of euphemism is admirable. “Not good” is surely an understatement when nearly three-quarters of Hongkongers have been found to have shown moderate to high levels of depressive symptoms – like feelings of worthlessness and recurrent thoughts of death. Separately, the Mental Health Association of Hong Kong found almost nine in 10 suffered from stress at work during the pandemic and half of the city’s workforce report symptoms of anxiety disorder. HKU’s dean of medicine Professor Gabriel Leung called the finding that nearly one in 10 Hongkongers have suspected depression in last year’s study “an epidemic of mental health [issues]”. Granted, “epidemic” has taken on an entirely different meaning since last year, but it’s gone up sevenfold. The compound impact of social unrest and public health crisis is catastrophic. It’s good to see the Advisory Committee on Mental Health roll out a “Shall We Talk” public awareness campaign, but so much more needs to be done. While – borrowing the words of Professor Chen here – mental health policies and services are “not good”, we need more than just the government to do better. Yes, we will need to introduce mental health metrics into our policymaking processes. But it takes all of us to boost our mental health literacy. It takes every one of us to stop stigmatising mental illness . And it begins with us coming to terms with our negative feelings and our worries at these extraordinarily challenging times. Our vulnerability makes us human. Alice Wu is a political consultant and a former associate director of the Asia Pacific Media Network at UCLA