Suicide remained the second-leading cause of death among young Taiwanese men and women aged 15 to 24 last year, with 60 percent of the cases related to relationship problems, a government official reported earlier this week.
Lee Ming-pin (李明濱), director of the Department of Health’s (DOH) Taiwan Suicide Prevention Center, said 4,092 people in the age bracket attempted suicide last year and 201 of them died.
Traffic accidents were the No. 1 cause of death for young Taiwanese people last year, while malignant tumors were the third-leading killer.
The figure of 201 suicide deaths was 14 percent lower than the 2007 number. Those who failed to kill themselves form the group with the highest possibility of attempting suicide again, he said.
Lee would not speculate, however, on whether the growing number of suicide attempts was linked to the global economic downturn, saying further analysis was needed.
The number of reported suicide cases involving Taiwan’s young men and women has increased steadily over the past four years, an expert said.
Based on the cases of youth suicides reported to authorities since 2006, Lee said 60 percent were driven by relationship problems, while, to the surprise of many, academic pressure accounted for less than 3 percent of the total.
About 25 percent of the young people sought to end their lives by taking sleeping pills or sedatives, followed by 21 percent who tried to slit their wrists. Self-poisoning as well as gas or burning charcoal resulted in the highest mortality rate of any method at 35.3 percent, he said.
Lee called on parents and teachers to pay adequate attention to the youth suicide problem by patiently listening to the voices of suicidal youngsters instead of labeling them as “fragile strawberries.”
The DOH reported earlier in the month that Taiwan’s suicide mortality rate had increased by 3.3 percent last year from the previous year — a trend some believed could be linked to financial problems caused by the sagging economy.
Among all age groups, suicide was the ninth leading cause of death in Taiwan last year, up one notch from 2007, a DOH report showed.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods