‘Isolated elders need community support’

An expert in suicide prevention has urged the community to begin offering more support to elderly people, saying that they’ve become more isolated than ever amid the pandemic.

Paul Yip of the University of Hong Kong made the comments after police revealed that they were treating the death of an elderly couple in a North Point flat as a case of murder-suicide.

Police said the 83-year-old man had been caring for his ill wife for a decade and told family members he was concerned he would struggle to look after her after he fell ill and began to lose his mobility at the end of last year.

The couple’s son had taken time off to move back in with them to help, but police said the family had not sought further help because they did not believe there was anything drastically wrong.

Asked what the community could do to help elderly people, Yip, who heads HKU’s Centre for Suicide Research and Prevention, said the response would involve support from professionals, as well as families.

“Well I think we have been talking about aging in place; I think there are a lot of elderly people who do not want to go into the elderly homes. They do want to stay in their own homes,” he told RTHK’s Joanne Wong.

“So I think some community support should be provided, some visits from the community nurse or the community social workers,” he said, adding that this would help avoid people feeling that they have been left behind.

He said the closure of centres for the elderly during the pandemic and the imposition of social distancing measures had been difficult for elderly people to deal with, and some families had been unable to visit their relatives as often as usual.