January 24, 2006	Tuesday	Zilhaj 23, 1426

HONG KONG: Yu Kei-cheong had a great success with his first textbook, using short stories to help primary school pupils understand maths, and a second volume is set to be released in the coming weeks.

But the teacher will never see that happen. He leapt to his death from his 22nd-storey apartment in early January — watched by his teenaged daughter — after complaining of being unhappy at work.

Yu was the second suicide that week by a Hong Kong teacher, and their deaths have sparked a renewed public debate about the hard-working lifestyle of this global financial centre.

“Hong Kong is a very ill society,” says Paul Yip, director of the Centre for Suicide Research and Prevention at Hong Kong University.

“People are facing a lot of pressure at work. You used to have three people doing the same job, now you have two. Everyone is after higher productivity and more financial gains,” he says.

Hong Kong’s suicide rate of 18.6 per 100,000 people is above the world average of 14.5, and officials say the rate is increasing dramatically among working-age professionals as well as unskilled workers.

In 2003, the last year for which the figures have been fully compiled, there were 1,264 suicides, up 14.1 per cent over 2002. The rate works out to more than three people every day.

Among professionals the suicide rate per 100,000 people increased from 2.28 between 1990 and 1994 to 7.3 from 1999 to 2003, according to official figures — more than a threefold increase.

Clinical psychologist Paul Wong, who wrote the content for “Depressed Little Prince,” the suicide centre’s website, says that many people in the city who are suffering from depression are reluctant to seek help.

“Hong Kong people think depression is a psychiatric illness, which is equivalent to being crazy,” Wong says.

According to the World Health Organisation, depression ranks fourth in the 10 leading cause of global burden of disease and is expected to become the number two cause within the next two decades.

Many experts believe that financial instability may account for the rising number of Hong Kongers who are taking their own lives.—AFP