【金九講座系列講座】Designing and scaling up integrated mental health care for older people

Venue: Room 108, College of Social Sciences, National Taiwan University

Each year, the College of Social Sciences and the Global Asia Research Center invite a globally renowned scholar to serve as the NTU-Kim Koo Professor and teach a mini-course. This annual NTU-Kim Koo Professorship Lecture Series enables students and faculty members to exchange scholarly ideas with distinguished scholars beyond Taiwan. This year, we are more than honored to have Professor Terry Lum from the University of Hong Kong to talk about Mental Health Care for Older People.

About one in ten older people experience significant depressive symptoms, impacting their mental health and overall well-being. Hong Kong’s mental health care system struggles to adequately address these issues due to a reliance on specialists with limited capacity. Untreated depression in older populations contributes to a high suicide rate and hinders the management of chronic diseases, leading to increased healthcare costs and suffering. Since 2016, Professor Terry Lum led a team at HKU to develop a groundbreaking stepped-care intervention for older individuals with depressive symptoms, proving to be more effective and cost-efficient than traditional methods. Since 2020, the project has been scaled up to all districts, including services by 18 NGO partners in 52 centers. It has reached over 100,000 older individuals, provided stepped-care intervention to more than 10,000, and trained more than 7,000 mental health ambassadors and 1,000 peer supporters. The program’s success is evident in the decreased suicide rates among older individuals, contrasting with rising rates in other age groups in recent years. In this presentation, Professor Lum will summarize the design and the scaling up of this charity-university-community collaboration to build a primary mental health care system for Hong Kong and how this experience may be relevant to other rapidly aging Asian countries.

Professor Lum, a faculty member in Social Work and Social Administration at the University of Hong Kong, specializes in long-term care, productive aging, and geriatric mental health. He advises the Hong Kong Government on long-term care policies, including assessment tools, service matching, and community care vouchers. He leads projects on aging, frailty prevention, and mental health and is an invited member of WHO committees on healthy aging. Formerly a tenured professor at the University of Minnesota, he was elected a Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America and currently serves on social welfare committees as well as the Hong Kong Minimum Wage Commission.