Tackling youth suicide in Hong Kong: the role of parents and educators

Eden Yeung well remembers the day, three years ago, when he left a letter on his parents' desk telling them he was ending his life.

The trigger may seem trivial to most of us; his teacher accidentally used a rude word in class. But Yeung, now 19, had to endure the taunts of his classmates because the word in question rhymes with his Chinese name and had become the cruel nickname bestowed on him by classmates.

The bullying was incessant, and Yeung says it left him alienated for five years and with no friends among the girls at his school. Worse, he found little support from his parents, growing distant from them as they devoted much of their attention to his brother, 13 years his junior.

"My parents considered their job done after paying for my tuition, clothes and food," said Yeung. "When I complained to my mother about the bullying at school, she never took it seriously and said it didn't hurt being ridiculed once in a while."

Yeung is by no means the only Hong Kong teenager to have contemplated taking his own life. In the first six weeks of this year, eight students and six school-leavers took their own lives, while four further suicide attempts were reported in the media.

While the overall suicide rate has been declining for the past decade, the number of suicides among boys and men aged 15 to 24 has edged upwards. Meanwhile the number of calls to the Suicide Prevention Service hotline in the past year was up 16 per cent year on year to 34,426.

Fortunately, Yeung chose to reach out before taking his own life. He called Samaritan Befrienders, a local voluntary organisation, as it was the first place he thought of turning to for help.