Updated June 2021 If you or anyone around you is in a situation where you are in need of advice or help, here are three suggestions as to what you could do to resolve the situation. 1. Learn how you can help yourself and others: We’ve completed our online “Classroom”-articles we’ve written with the goal to support the community in taking care of one’s mental health and giving guidance on how to respond to depression. 2. Go to CandleX’s Mental Health Peer Support Group in Beij

Hello there! Here’s the latest from our brave young people writing the letter they have always wanted to write, as part of our Community Writing Project sharing stories from our community. Our writer this week is Mary, a Beijing-based high schooler, who wrote a letter “to her parents” about a recent moving experience she had with music. If you haven’t already, don’t forget to follow us on Twitter at @CandleX_Beijing To my dearest parents, It's been quite a while since the las

Moving to a new country, going through a breakup, losing a job, or living with mental conditions are very challenging. Yet, there's no reason to suffer alone when one can choose to join hands with others and let the power of connection and group support encourage and heal us. In the absence of such social support in Beijing, CandleX established the peer support group in October 2015, with the goal to provide psychosocial support to the Beijing community. Our group meeting shi

Lilian, born in Fujian China, studies at Madeira High School in Virginia, the USA. She wrote to us sharing her experiences with school bullying both in China and in the USA. Author: Lilian Huang (pseudonym for privacy) Wrote in: 2021 I will start my story from the last year of my preschool. I moved from a small town in China to the city and transferred to another school. The new school was different from the one I attended previously because it was a private school that taugh

Small and intimate gathering For the taboo of suicide On the 10th of September – the World Suicide Prevention Day – Xiaojie Qin, the founder of CandleX, took part in a Beijing Community Dinners’ event. The discussion was on the pressing topic of suicide in China. Both Beijing community members and journalists from Global Times, CNN, and Xinhua news joined the small gathering over a shared meal. The intention of this dinner and discussion was to shed more light on the often un

In China, by the end of 2019, nearly 140,000 people would die by suicide [1]. In China, suicide is the fifth leading cause of death and accounts for over one-quarter of suicides worldwide. In Beijing, a city estimated to have 22 million people, this means that around 2100 die by suicide each year. Therefore, on average, six people complete suicide each day in Beijing (if calculated with the same suicide rate (9.7 per 100,000 people). Yet, we do not talk about it. CandleX is t