Letters | Suicide in Hong Kong: don’t pit wellness measures against medical treatment

Readers discuss the approach to tackling youth suicide in the city, and the challenges and rewards of preparing for the Diploma of Secondary Education exam

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In treating depression, pharmacological and non-pharmacological strategies should be seen as different pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, not as competitors. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 11:30am, 26 Mar 2025

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I share the views expressed in the op-ed, “Amid spate of youth suicides, Hong Kong must weave a safety net” (March 16), on the need to normalise conversations about mental health, encourage seeking help and empower everyone to recognise warning signs of mental problems. The writer makes a compelling point about building resilience within the community at large, not just targeting “high-risk” groups.

However, I take issue with the suggestion that the emphasis should be on promoting wellness rather than providing treatment, as well as the pitting of pharmacological treatment against non-pharmacological strategies in resolving mental health issues.

First, promoting wellness can be achieved only in the medium to long term, while patients need to be treated as soon as possible for obvious reasons. The speed of obtaining treatment can be enhanced once the public no longer sees mental health problems as dubious or difficult to tackle. Promoting a correct understanding of the biological underpinnings of mental health problems and their treatments should not be as hard as is often imagined.

Promoting wellness is more complicated because it appears to conflict with some entrenched objectives of our society, such as economic growth, increased productivity and parents having high aspirations for their children. Having said that, providing treatment and achieving wellness should both be pursued without one being done at the expense of the other.

Second, pharmacological and non-pharmacological strategies should be seen as different pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, not as competitors. The biopsychosocial model has been adopted by psychiatrists and others as the framework for mental illnesses such as depression. Pharmacological treatment is said to work better for moderate to severe depression and psychotherapy for relatively milder depression. Sometimes both pharmacological treatment and psychotherapy are needed; it is not a matter of one or the other.