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Letters

Feel strongly about these letters, or any other aspects of the news? Share your views by emailing us your Letter to the Editor at letters@scmp.com or filling in this Google form. Submissions should not exceed 400 words.
I read the chief executive’s policy address delivered last week from its first page to its last and one word never appears: hope.
Its 11 mental health measures are all about coping. Two gaps stand out.
First, the missing middle. Four of the 11 measures target students, teachers or parents. Working adults in general explicitly appear once, in a voluntary workplace charter. Yet those aged 25 to 40 are the ones who walk through our doors at TreeholeHK: too old for school counsellors, too young for elderly services, too busy for a psychiatry queue measured in years. This group is left almost entirely to the private market.
Second, hope. A cohort study published in The Lancet in 2020, which followed Hong Kong adults for a decade, found that probable depression stood at 1.9 per cent in 2009-14, and rose to 6.5 per cent in 2017 and 11.2 per cent in 2019, with suspected post-traumatic stress disorder at 12.8 per cent in 2019. That 1.9 per cent is the point: remarkably low by any international standards.
Our mental health machinery is far more sophisticated than it was two decades ago. But care alone cannot restore what the community has lost. Western Australia’s Act-Belong-Commit campaign, statewide since 2008, does not tell people to wait for a diagnosis; it asks them to act, belong to a club or cause, and commit to something larger than themselves. Around 80 per cent of adults recognise it, and one in six who do so acted on it.
England’s National Health Service goes further: when a general practitioner sees loneliness, the “prescription” is a link worker who connects the patient to a gardening project or community kitchen, not a waiting list.
Both treat the individual as owner of their mental health and the community as the medicine.
Our policy address seems to treat Hongkongers as cases. Its vocabulary is telling: identify, assess, refer, follow up. Not one of the measures on mental health asks residents to build anything of their own. Hong Kong needs a community model alongside its care model, where working adults build something, belong to something and see a tomorrow they helped shape. A narrative that counts referrals tells people they are patients. One that builds community tells them they are citizens with a future.
Every policy tells its people a story. This one says: you have symptoms; we will help manage it. Hong Kong deserves another: you are capable; the future is yours to build.
Peter Chan, managing director and chief psychology specialist, TreeholeHK Limited
City can’t simply adopt New York’s drug courts model
As a defence lawyer in Hong Kong, I read the letter, “Why Hong Kong needs special courts for drug offenders” (August 26) with interest but I would be cautious about importing that model wholesale.
The letter states that a criterion for eligibility for New York’s drug courts is the absence of a violent conviction. That appears to leave open the possibility that a low-level courier with no violent record could qualify for a treatment-and-supervision pathway. Hong Kong has long treated trafficking as distinct from personal use and warranting deterrence because it facilitates supply throughout the community. Any transplant of the New York model needs to close that gap before it can credibly apply here.
The letter rightly notes that our drug addiction treatment model differs from that of New York, and that capacity is a constraint. But it is worth being precise about what already exists. Under section 4 of the Drug Addiction Treatment Centres Ordinance (Cap. 244), a court may order a suitable offender into a treatment centre in lieu of another sentence, subject to a commissioner’s report on suitability and place availability, with sections 5 and 6 providing a 12-month supervision order on release and recall on breach of orders. For personal users specifically, Section 54A of the Dangerous Drugs Ordinance (Cap. 134) makes consideration of a commissioner’s cure-and-rehabilitation report compulsory before any custodial sentence for possession or apparatus offences.
The genuine question, then, is not whether Hong Kong lacks a rehabilitative response, since it does not, but whether the existing statutory duty and supervision regime can be reformed and resourced to approximate the ongoing judicial monitoring and collaborative model the letter describes, without the sentencing leniency for trafficking that a wholesale transplant risks. Before concluding that Hong Kong needs an entirely new judicial institution, that narrower question deserves an answer first.
Ahmed Ashfaq, Tsim Sha Tsui


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Mental health

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Illustration: Lau Ka-kuen

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Hong Kong to invest in primary care to cut premature death risk to 6.9%

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Foreign carers for elderly to get 10 to 20% more pay than current helpers

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Hong Kong’s 5-year plan plays it too safe

Television screens at a store in Quarry Bay show a live broadcast of Chief Executive John Lee delivering his fifth policy address and unveiling the city’s first five-year plan on September 16. Photo: Karma Lo

People commute to work in Sai Wan Ho on December 16, 2025. The city’s five-year plan includes “anticipatory” livelihood goals like keeping median monthly employment earnings in line with economic growth. Photo: Sun Yeung

Opinion

Readers discuss how the chief executive positioned mental health in his policy address, and the suggestion that Hong Kong should import New York’s drug court model


Readers discuss how the chief executive positioned mental health in his policy address, and the suggestion that Hong Kong should import New York’s drug court model.


.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Readers discuss how the chief executive positioned mental health in his policy address, and the suggestion that Hong Kong should import New York’s drug court model

Readers discuss how the chief executive positioned mental health in his policy address, and the suggestion that Hong Kong should import New York’s drug court model