Kaohsiung must act on the city’s high suicide rate, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Kaohsiung mayoral candidate Ko Chih-en (柯志恩) said yesterday, while Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chi-mai (陳其邁), who is seeking re-election, said that suicide “should not be an election issue.”
Ko said Chen was ignoring city residents’ problems after reports that eight bodies of people who had apparently committed suicide were found in the city’s rivers within 37 days.
“Is Chen Chi-mai taking residents’ suffering seriously?” Ko wrote on social media on Friday.
Photo: Ge Yu-hao, Taipei Times
Chen, of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), yesterday said that suicide is a serious issue that should not be dragged into election campaigns.
He had never seen the issue being discussed during past election campaigns, he added.
His administration has addressed the suicide issue and worked on it with community volunteers and clinical psychiatrists, he said.
Photo: CNA
The city’s suicide rate has decreased since he took office, Chen said.
Ko had said that there had been 4,700 suicides in the city over the past 10 years.
The Kaohsiung Health Bureau said the most suicides were recorded in 2019, when Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT was mayor.
Ko yesterday said that Chen’s administration “always uses Han Kuo-yu as a scapegoat,” while Kaohsiung’s suicide rate remained the highest among the six special municipalities.
“Chen should hurry up and think of effective ways to prevent suicides,” she said.
Ko’s campaign office released a statement saying that the number of suicides in Kaohsiung rose from 453 in 2020 to 490 last year, with Chen as mayor.
“We bring up the kind of issues that concern the city’s residents because we hope the situation can improve,” the statement said.
Separately, suicide prevention volunteers and clinical psychiatrists issued a joint statement saying that discussing suicide at campaign events was “worrisome and contemptible,” calling on candidates to avoid the topic.
“This talk evokes painful memories for the friends and relatives of suicide victims,” the statement said. “It also risks encouraging copycat suicides.”
Additional reporting by Fang Chih-hsien
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
RSS