PARENT-CHILD SUICIDES RISING IN HONG KONG?

Earlier this month, divers took to the polluted waters of Hong Kong's Rambler Channel, searching for the drowned body of a seven-year-old boy. A week prior, the boy and his mother, a 39-year-old divorcÉe and welfare recipient, were seen plunging 17 meters into the sea from the Tsing Yi Bridge, near the city's container port.

• The mother's body was quickly retrieved, but except for a red schoolbag there was no trace of the boy until March 4. On that day, his body was finally hauled out of the water and Hong Kong notched up a peculiarly grim statistic - it was the third instance in a month of a mother killing her child and herself.
• So-called filicide-suicides are not a new phenomenon in East Asia, but Hong Kong's relatively high number - there have been at least 15 since the start of 2008 - has raised alarm. "Three in one month is a critical warning sign," says Paul Yip, director of the Centre for Suicide Research and Prevention in Hong Kong.
• In the United States, murder-suicides predominantly involve spouses killing partners before taking their own lives. But in Hong Kong, Yip says, at least 50% of cases involve the death of a child.
• Feelings of isolation unite these cases. Researchers agree that in instances of filicide-suicide, parents feel there is no friend or relative able or trustworthy enough to care for the children.
• "In Hong Kong, it's common not to know neighbors who have been beside you for 10 years," says researcher Yip. While social and mental health workers have been asked to pay close attention to depressed parents of small children, professional help remains thin on the ground in Hong Kong, and is no substitute for a strong personal support network.
• "It is packed here," says Yip of a city where population density, at its highest, exceeds 50,000 per square kilometer. "Physically we are very close, but emotionally we could not be more distant."

Source: TIME