Hong Kong map pinpoints neighbourhoods with highest number of suicides

It is a map of misery and death – a grimly fascinating overview of Hong Kong that offers a neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood breakdown of thousands of lives lost to suicide.

Bright red patches mark the hotspots where suicide rates are the highest, while deep blue colours show the areas where rates are the lowest. Lighter shades of red and blue mark the areas that fall between the high and low rates.

A team of academics and psychiatrists from Hong Kong and Taiwan spent two years studying 5,754 suicides across the city from 2005 to 2010 to create the map, believed to be the first detailed small-area analysis of suicide in an Asian city.

Previously, suicides have only been broken down according to Hong Kong’s 18 districts, and geographical clusters of suicides only identified by exceptional circumstances – such as the spate of suicides a decade ago that led Tin Shui Wai to be nicknamed City of Sorrows.

By contrast, the new “suicide map” breaks down the deaths by neighbourhood – there are more than 1,000, each of around 5,000 people – giving the most detailed insight into the spatial patterning of something that still claims two to three lives a day.

“It is like a microscope,” says Professor Paul Yip Siu-fai, director of the Hong Kong Jockey Club Centre for Suicide Prevention and Research at the University of Hong Kong and one of the report’s co-authors.