Hong Kong Stories
What’s Real and What’s Not? (35x8)
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31-year-old WONG Ka-kit is a peer support worker in a psychiatric rehabilitation organisation and a schizophrenia patient himself. Ka-kit first experienced auditory hallucination after graduating from university. At first, he heard how the juvenile gang near his home harassed him, then a man and a woman gossiping. These “voices” all sounded so real that he once thought someone installed a tapping device in the air-conditioner in order to surveil his home.
The “voices” cost Ka-kit his job and left him no choice but to receive Comprehensive Social Security Assistance. On one occasion when he was sweeping leaves in a park as part of community work, an old man said to him, “We are in the lowest stratum of society.” Ka-kit was thunderstruck and felt that life was frustrating – he was a university graduate but had descended into poverty. For a period of time, he marginalized himself, staying at home all day long and saying nothing every day except his food orders. In the meantime, he was obsessed with philosophy forums on the Internet, being desperate to do something to counteract the “voices”. He even imagined developing his own school of philosophy.
After a 3-year torment by the “voices”, Ka-kit finally sought medical advice with the assistance of social workers, and understood that the “voices” were a symptom of psychiatric illness. He was actually relieved to be diagnosed as he believed he would recover. Since then, Ka-kit has become more proactive and joined various support groups in psychiatric rehabilitation organizations to share his experience of having auditory hallucination. In addition, he signed up to be a peer support worker so as to help those who had also been agonized by “voices”. In September 2017, he even left Hong Kong by plane for the first time to attend an international conference on psychiatric rehabilitation in Thailand, which gave him even more experiences and revelations.
Although Ka-kit still experiences auditory hallucination now, he
