To coincide with World Suicide Prevention Day, a series of seminars, group therapy sessions and other events will begin today across the country to raise public awareness of depression.
The event is sponsored by the Taiwan Alliance Against Depression, which was formed yesterday in Taipei by 10 major organizations with the goal of lowering depression and suicide rates.
Lin Ming-jeng (林明政), president of the Tainan Depression Care Association and a former depression sufferer, said that people who are plagued by depression or commit suicide are not mentally or emotionally “weak.”
“While depression can be induced by many different factors, one of the major factors is stress,” he said, adding that depression not only affects those with low self esteem, but also commonly affects perfectionists that expect too much from themselves and from others. When things don’t go their way, these people wind up becoming severely disappointed, he said.
The biggest challenge in treating patients with depression is learning how to encourage patients not to discontinue medication, which often causes the illness to recur, said Lai Te-jen (賴德仁), president of the Taiwan Association Against Depression.
“After one month [of treatment], 20 percent stop coming back. After two months, 50 percent; and after three months, the number climbs to 80 percent,” he said.
But “medication is not the only thing they need,” he added, emphasizing the importance of listening to and caring for people with the disorder.
At the press conference, Jeffery Su (蘇禾), secretary-general of the Can Love Foundation, said that he had been plagued by depression years ago.
“We want to let [people who are depressed] know that ‘I’m no longer alone,’ and that there is a reason for them to keep breathing,” he said.
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
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
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