Letters | Youth depression in Hong Kong is not just a mental health issue
- Readers discuss the importance of delving into the social, political and environmental causes of students’ mental health challenges, how to make foreign students feel welcomed, a possible factor in falling Chinese standards, and the plight of North Koreans living in China
What makes Mr Wong think more psychiatrists and psychologists are the answer to tackling our city’s mental health problems? Do countries that meet the WHO’s standards see a lower prevalence of mental disorders, “common” or otherwise?
Landmark studies have shown that high-income countries with relatively more resources in mental health care tend to do worse, not better, than their low- and middle-income counterparts. Certainly, there are many explanations underlying this paradox – chicken or egg being one. But whether or not the answer to our youth’s plight is to introduce more strangers into their lives is both an empirical question and a moral one.
On what basis can one explain away the distractedness and hopelessness of youth as a mental health issue, when it is just as valid to frame it as economic, political, equity, social mobility, or family failures? Thinking that those who took their own lives did so because they were depressed is tautological, if not intellectually lazy.
Categorising our youth’s struggle as a mental health problem and further enlarging and empowering the mental health industry, with its clear vested interest, as a solution, is succumbing to “psychiatrisation”.
The mental health industry (psychiatrists, psychologists, pharmaceutical companies, insurers) supplies the populace with concepts (“what is good parenting”), diagnoses (“what is a disorder”) and services, while the populace learn to see their agony through such lenses and demand psychiatric services. When they don’t, they are considered mental health “illiterate”. No wonder we see increasing incidences of mental disorders and a call for more providers.
We experts give you a label for your sorrows (“depression”) and for the mismatch between your child’s need and what the environment provides (“ADHD”) and offer you a pill or trademarked therapy as the fix. This excuses our need to address the underlying societal, political and moral problems and allows us to shirk our responsibilities as distracted parents, overworked teachers, soulless politicians, and self-centred neighbours.
Dr Christian Chan, associate professor, Department of Psychology, University of Hong Kong
Next, open the job market wider to foreign graduates
Hong Kong should go one step further to help non-local graduates secure jobs.
Recruitment agencies could set up dedicated consultants to assist non-locals, working with companies and organisations that are willing to hire them, while universities should collaborate more closely with industry to ensure equal opportunities for non-local graduates in the job market.
Non-locals bring diverse perspectives to the table and an open, multicultural environment is valuable to organisations. Hong Kong should address these issues if it is to retain its status as an international city.
If international students see the job market as being closed to them, some may be deterred from coming to study here in the first place.
Adeoti Joy, Yuen Long
Adverts must share blame for falling Chinese standards
Recent media reports on the mistakes Diploma of Secondary Education (DSE) exam takers made in this year’s Chinese exam should come as no surprise.
The Hong Kong Examinations and Assessment Authority last week published the “2023 DSE Question Papers” that included not only the exam scripts but also the markers’ comments and analysis of the candidates’ performances. In the Chinese language paper, there were many instances of the wrong Chinese characters being used, often bearing the same or similar sound but having a different meaning.
There has been a fad in recent years of advertisers intentionally using the wrong word with the same sound to create a new, catchy phrase. Such a gimmick may appeal to the younger generation, but it causes confusion and in time the phrases with the wrong words may become accepted, quite wrongly, as proper usage.
Given our concern about falling Chinese language standards, we should refrain from such word games and use the phrases only with the proper characters.
J. Lau, Ma Tau Wai
Spare a thought for North Koreans hiding in China
So what are we to believe? If the reports are true, North Koreans who are deported will almost certainly face harsh punishment, or even execution, under the repressive Kim Jong-un regime.
It’s time for the world to stand up for the estimated thousands of North Koreans still hiding in China.
Brian Stuckey, Denver, US
