Civic groups attending a forum for depression and suicide prevention warned yesterday that the nation's suicide rate has risen dramatically over the past decade, and that it is often closely linked to depression. They also noted that suicide was ranked ninth in the nation's top 10 causes of death last year.
Nationwide last year, 15.3 people out of every 100,000 committed suicide compared to 1994, when only 6.2 per 100,000 did, according to Department of Health (DOH) statistics.
DOH Minister Hou Sheng-mou (侯勝茂) stressed that suicide-prevention and depression are inseparable issues and must be dealt with together.
Hou also said that he was happy with the current levels of cooperation between the government and civic groups in dealing with the situation.
Lee Ming-been (李明濱), director of the Taiwan Association for Depression Prevention, said that studies have shown that 15 percent of those with depression commit suicide.
Depression increased in the country following the 921 earthquake in 1999, Lee said. The disaster had a deep psychological impact on the people, he added.
Experts said that before the earthquake struck, the suicide rate in Nantou County was already one of the highest in Taiwan.
In 1999, 16.7 people per 100,000 committed suicide, and according to studies, two years after the earthquake that figure had risen to 22.9 per 100,000.
DOH figures indicate that suicide is most common in men age between 25 and 64. However, recent studies carried out by the John Tung Foundation (JTF) showed that 24.1 percent of the nation's college students, age 18 to 24, suffer from severe depression.
Yeh Ya-hsing (葉雅馨), a JTF representative, said that employment problems, relationships, planning for the future and money were the main causes of depression in college students.
There is also a link between Internet usage and depression for adolescents between the ages of 12 to 18, Yeh said.
Yeh added that 27.8 percent of youths in that age group suffered from depression and the time they spent on the Internet chatting and writing email increased as their depression worsened, since adolescents choose to turn to their online friends to talk about problems instead of talking to their parents.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater