Hong Kong teachers on front line of spotting student suicide risks in ‘top priority’ push

Schools make mental health a priority, but looking out for troubled students a challenge for teachers

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Published: 8:30am, 13 Jun 2024Updated: 10:27am, 13 Jun 2024

Hong Kong schools have swung into suicide-prevention mode since more than 30 schoolchildren took their lives last year. In the second of a two-part series, the Post examines how teachers and school social workers are coping at the front line of looking out for children in distress, and the multiple other efforts under way to tackle the crisis. Read part one here.

English-language teacher Amy Chan* has been making an extra effort to look out for teenagers in distress since a girl at her Hong Kong secondary school killed herself last year.

Since the academic year began last September, she has referred two of her pupils to the school’s social workers.

“No matter what we do, it seems impossible to prevent students from having negative thoughts. We don’t understand why so many think about suicide so readily,” she said.

After the student’s death, the school cut the number of assessments to reduce academic stress, and has been holding regular mental health activities including talks and mindfulness workshops.

“Finding out who has mental health needs has become the top priority,” Chan said. “The strategy is to identify potentially suicidal students as early as possible, because we don’t know what they might do when they are not under our supervision outside campus.”

Hong Kong schools have made their students’ mental health a priority following a surge of suicides and suicide attempts by young people since the Covid-19 pandemic, and especially after the current academic year began.