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S057-3

A Community Based Suicide Prevention Program: a Hong Kong Experience

Paul SF Yip

The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Background/Objective: Suicide rate has experienced significant increase and decline in the past two
decades. The rate increased from 12.0 per 100,000 in 1997 to its historical high 18.6 per 100,000 in
2003 and then decline and back to 12.6 in 2014. It is of interest to examine factors relating to the
changes of suicide rates.

Method: We shall make use of the data with spatial information from the Coroner court to highlight
the spatial difference in suicide rate. Age-standardized rate will be used to access the impact of
ageing on changes of suicide rate. The decomposition method will be used to examine the impact of
charcoal burning on the increase and decrease of suicide rate in Hong Kong

Result: Ageing is one of the important factor in understanding the increase of suicide rate in Hong
Kong and other rapidly ageing societies in Asia. Increase in the number of single parent household
is also conducive to the increase of the suicide rate. Also, the new emerging method of Charcoal
burning suicide had been contributed significantly to the increase and decrease suicide rate for the
period 1997-2003 and 2004-2014, respectively. Charcoal burning has remained as one of the leading
methods of suicide since then. Some community based suicide prevention efforts (e.g restriction of
means and promoting responsible media reporting) have been shown to be effective in suicide
prevention.

Conclusion: It is important to be able to capture suicide information in a timely manner such that
more focused effort can be targeted. A concerted multidisciplinary community effort is likely to
contain the spread of suicide in the community.
References: Yip, P. S. F., Yousuf, S., Chan, C. H., Yung, T., & Wu, K. C. C. (2015). The roles of
culture and gender in the relationship between divorce and suicide risk: A meta-analysis. Social
Science & Medicine, 128, 87-94.
Yip, P. S. F., Caine, E., Yousuf, S., Chang, S.S, Wu, K.C. & Chen, Y.Y. (2012). Means restriction for
suicide prevention. Lancet, 379, 2293-2399.