Hong Kong's first-ever round-the-clock online counseling platform for young people has finally been launched. It uses exclusively online and mobile messaging to talk to people about their troubles.
According to South China Morning Post, individuals who are aged between 11 and 35 can go to Open Up's website or message counselors at hkopenup on Facebook Messenger, Instagram or WeChat. They can also send a WhatsApp or SMS to 91012012.
The service is made available in both English and Chinese, and it began on October 1. Since its launching, over 100 people in Hong Kong had used it to chat with counselors - who spent an hour on each case on average - each day. And in the coming three years, the platform will recruit 450 volunteer counselors.
Professor Paul Yip Siu-fai, director of the Centre for Suicide Research and Prevention at the University of Hong Kong, which helps run the service, said it aimed to fill the gaps left by current suicide prevention hotlines, for example by being available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Some people also felt more comfortable writing down their thoughts and worries that talking about them, he said.
Yip said a surge in suicide two years ago, when the number of cases in a four-month period hit what would normally be an annual count in Hong Kong, prompted the idea.
"We asked if there was anything the existing [suicide prevention] services had missed. Then we realized that some students did not find help through traditional ways, but were sometimes leaving online messages to friends without getting replies, so we came up with the idea," he said.
Yip added that he expected Open Up to help about 60,000 people in 45 months, the duration of the project.
A project team he led did research in Hong Kong using a mobile phone and online surveys engaging 1,527 and 1,732 young people respectively, which showed young people preferred text messaging to phone calls or face-to-face conversations. The team found online respondents tended to have more emotional problems than phone call respondents. Among them, 46 percent had considered suicide and 8 percent had attempted suicide.
#mce_temp_url#Beyond Blue notes that even if people are not quite sure what to say, the important thing is that they say something. Considering the platform's premise, there is no doubt it could really help people who are inclined to suicidal thoughts. It is a matter of letting them know that some is concerned and why.
