Suicide Center to Open

I blog from time to time on the problem of suicide here. I was thus cheered to see that the government is opening a suicide prevention center:

A national center for suicide prevention was inaugurated yesterday as part of the government's efforts to curb the rising suicide rate in Taiwan.

According to a survey conducted by the Rheumatology Association (RA) under the commission of the Department of Health, around 7 percent of respondents above age 17 said they had thought of suicide.

A total of 8,835 households around the country -- excluding the outlying islands -- were interviewed for the survey over the course of the past year. The results show that around 1.7 percent of the respondents had thought of committing suicide in the past year, some 0.3 percent had planned to take their own lives and about 0.2 percent had attempted to kill or injure themselves.

[Taiwan]