For low-cost mental health support in Hong Kong, Mind HK’s free well-being checks are a good start, to help ‘make sense’ of your feelings

Mind HK offers an Emotional Wellbeing Check-in – 45 minutes with a well-being professional who listens and lays out steps to get necessary mental health support

Amid a shortage of accessible support in Hong Kong, the charity aims to ‘validate’ people’s struggles and help them understand their emotional well-being status

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Hong Kong mental health charity Mind HK’s free Emotional Wellbeing Check-ins aim to help people who may otherwise not have access to support understand their emotional well-being status and needs. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 4:15pm, 21 Jan 2024

Eddie began noticing that something wasn’t quite right six years ago. When boarding public transport or entering a lift his hands would shake and he would find it hard to breathe. He ignored the signals his body was sending him and laughed it off with his friends.

A little over a year later, the anxiety and claustrophobia he’d been experiencing developed into his first full-blown panic attack, which happened on an airliner.

The 41-year-old sought out help and, as part of his recovery, now practises meditation and mindfulness and pursues an active lifestyle. He is also an ambassador for Hong Kong mental health charity Mind HK.

“If I’d have got help when I first noticed my symptoms, I might not have got to the point of having panic attacks,” he says.

Eddie, a 41-year-old with a history of anxiety, is now a Mind HK ambassador. Photo: Mind HK

Seeking help early sounds like sensible advice, but many people don’t know how to get started or where to go, and may even be questioning whether what they are experiencing is serious enough to bother anyone with it.

Consider this: in 2013, one in seven Hong Kong residents was experiencing a common mental health disorder; today that figure is one in six. And fewer than 30 per cent of people with a mental health condition receive support. If this is something you or a loved one is experiencing, you are not alone.