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

Reading Time:3 minutes

People walk on a bridge in Hong Kong’s Tai Po district in April last year. Studies have shown that high-income countries with relatively more resources in mental health care do not necessarily do better than their low- and middle-income counterparts. Photo: Jelly Tse

Published: 11:30am, 7 Nov 2023

Feel strongly about these letters, or any other aspects of the news? Share your views by emailing us your Letter to the Editor at [email protected] or filling in this Google form. Submissions should not exceed 400 words, and must include your full name and address, plus a phone number for verification.

I read with curiosity your recent article on the claim by the Advisory Committee on Mental Health, a government advisory body, that the solution to tackling attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and depression among schoolchildren is to hire more psychiatrists and other mental health professionals (“ADHD, depression the most common among Hong Kong schoolchildren: surveys”, November 3). The committee’s chairman Wong Yan-lung cited the World Health Organization’s recommendation of one psychiatrist for every 10,000 people to suggest our city lacks at least 300.

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”.