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How philanthropist William Louey is tackling student mental health crisis with Hong Kong’s suicide helpline

A recent rise in student suicides has sparked urgent intervention from Hong Kong entrepreneur and educational philanthropist William Louey alongisde charity helpline, Suicide Prevention Services

An alarming report by Samaritan Befrienders Hong Kong released in 2024 showed that suicides in schools are actually increasing compared to data collected during the same time period in 2023. This phenomenon was particularly rampant at the start of the school term, and as a result, the NGO received 240 requests for help from youngsters in the first 10 months of 2024.

These events clearly increased Hong Kong’s anxiety around the sort of academic pressures students were facing in schools. This and many other factors, such as another set of statistics reported in The Lancet that showed that suicide claims 1,000 lives annually for a decade before 2023, drove one Hong Kong businessman to take urgent action.

An urgent collaboration

In order to tackle this worsening mental health crisis, William Louey Lai Kuen, the director of the Kowloon Motor Bus Company, Hong Kong’s oldest transportation firm, who is also the founder of William S.D. Louey Educational Foundation, an organisation that has provided over HKD $60 million worth of scholarships, recently announced an urgent collaboration with Suicide Prevention Services (SPS) another well-known local charity and helpline. The charity receives an average of nearly 10,000 calls per month for urgent help from students who “express feelings of guilt and a sense that they cannot escape their predicaments, leading them to view suicide as their only way out”, according to SPS’s Executive Director Mr Vincent Ng Chi-Kwan.

The collaboration between William Louey Lai Kuen's foundation and SPS features a digital mental health campaign called “Breaking The Silence” which is aimed at young students aged 15-25 in Hong Kong.

Heart-to-heart talks

This collaborative campaign between the William S.D. Louey Educational Foundation and SPS, crafted with the creative guidance of William Louey himself, has launched an insightful new YouTube series. The series of videos presents engaging talks in English and Cantonese with five key opinion leaders who answer personal but anonymised questions from students. Some of the topics covered include exam stress, bullying, parental expectations and navigating feelings of failure.

This series emulates virtual heart-to-heart conversations with experts who have a deep understanding of Hong Kong’s education system. Each video contains engaging and highly relatable content from each expert filmed on camera, where in many instances they appear to speak from compelling personal experiences as people who were themselves once students in Hong Kong before they achieved success in their relative careers.

The speakers are Stephanie Ng who founded Body Banter, a company that empowers individuals around self perception issues; Michael Chan who founded Companion HK, a company that fights against the stigma around mental health;  leading psychologist Dr Adrian Low; Carlton Shiu, a prominent social entrepreneur and TEDx Speaker; and Vivek Mahbubani, a stand up comedian and mental health campaigner.

An alarming reflection

William Louey Lai Kuen is a philanthropist who founded the William S.D. Louey Educational Foundation. For the past 30 years, William Louey, through his foundation, has been giving away generous overseas scholarships to underprivileged students from mainland China and Hong Kong. During that period, the entrepreneur has been personally involved in each scholar’s progress and acted as a guide and a mentor to most of them, efforts which extend beyond the financial assistance that most scholarships will provide students with.

Working closely with his scholars exposed William Louey to the harsh realities many students face in the pathway to higher education in Asian schools, especially in Hong Kong where he is a resident. After a period of reflection on this issue and consulting with experts, William Louey decided that something needed to be done quickly, which led to his foundation’s first-time collaboration with SPS.

William Louey Lai Kuen sincerely believes in the importance of helping students communicate openly with non-judgmental experts, such as those featured in the Breaking The Silence campaign, instead of suffering with their personal challenges in silence. He said: “Young people need and deserve a system that prioritises mental health, eases academic pressures, and encourages self confidence and acceptance of an individual’s many strengths. I believe this collaboration will be a valuable step forward to protecting and improving young people’s mental health in Hong Kong.”

Unbearable academic pressures

Despite being one of the most developed regions globally, Hong Kong has a severe mental health crisis which is exacerbated by significantly lower psychiatrist-to-population ratio compared to other developing populations. In this backdrop, studies show that younger people report academic pressure as one of the biggest influences on their well-being and the source of their resulting ill mental health, which suicide is a symptom of.

This intense academic pressure is exercised by parents on their children and this often results in feelings of inadequacy and a numbing fear of failure. Parents are often responding to a society in which perfect grades are the only pathway to securing a good future for their children.

Crippling perfectionism

An attitude that prioritises success above everything, also known as socially prescribed perfectionism, is the result of the increasingly competitive economy and high pressure society Hong Kong operates under, where the pressure to succeed is intensifying amid rising living costs and lack of employment opportunities due to economic pressures.

Schools in Hong Kong are also contributing to this problem, as they often go to great measures to ensure high success rates. For example, Hong Kong schools are notorious for giving out hours-long homework each day to students, even those as young as six. Exams are also introduced to students at younger ages to demonstrate even earlier academic achievement and scrutiny.

Half of Hong Kong’s student population is describing themselves as “distressed”. Perfectionism has a crippling effect on students, as they struggle with feelings that nothing they do is ever enough for their schools or their parents. These thoughts can create anxiety that prevents students from performing well, which makes these feelings of inadequacy worse. As a result, research finds that students often struggle with higher levels of depressive symptoms and poorer mental health among adolescents compared to other regions in the world.

Prioritise adolescent mental health

Echoing the sentiments of William Louey, who is making a call for change in Hong Kong’s adolescent mental health, SPS’s Executive Director also stresses on the importance of good mental health support services and campaigns to help solve this crisis among students.

William Louey Lai Kuen said: “Students consistently express feelings of guilt and a sense that they cannot escape their predicaments, leading them to view suicide as their only way out — reflecting a lack of mental health support in the current system and highlighting an urgent need for increased attention to adolescent mental health”.

As a fourth generation entrepreneur in Hong Kong, William Louey has himself personally witnessed many mental health challenges that Hong Kong society is privy to, where failure is highly stigmatised and seeking help is often seen as a sign of personal defeat or weakness. He is determined that this mentality must change quickly. 

The collaboration between William S.D. Educational Foundation and SPS signifies change in the horizon for Hong Kong’s mental health awareness, especially where young people are concerned. To find out more about this campaign, visit https://www.youtube.com/@WilliamLoueyLaiKuen

You can contact 生命熱線 Suicide Prevention Services (SPS) hotline at: 2382 0000

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Jane Wang .