At The Fellowship Conferment Ceremony 2008

Professor Tang, Prof. Bhugra, Prof. Bateman, Mr. Solomon, Dr. Leung, honoured guests from all the Academy Colleges, Fellows, Members and Affiliates, ladies and gentleman, thank you for coming to the 2008 Fellowship Conferment Ceremony of the Hong Kong College of Psychiatrists.

This year we have the pleasure of conferring the Fellowship upon 24 new Fellows. This is a record high for the College and reflects the increasing number of new recruits in psychiatry. We’d like to think that our continuous advocacy for better psychiatric service for the community has been listened and empathically responded to.

On behalf of the Council, I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate our new Fellows sitting here this evening for achieving a career milestone and to thank their trainers and supervisors for the fine training they have provided over the years to make this achievement possible. It has been an arduous journey for all of you, and this is indeed a time for celebration. This is also an opportune time for you to re-think why you have chosen psychiatry as your lifetime career in the first place.

In selection interviews for new recruits, a standard question many would ask is why, out of all medical specialties, a candidate would like to choose psychiatry. Despite the various “politically correct” answers, I have long suspected that, for many, the unspoken reason is that psychiatry is perceived as an easy and undemanding specialty. I hope by now, if you were one of those candidates, you would have discovered to your dismay that this is not indeed the case. Psychiatrists deal with diseases afflicting the most complex and least well-understood organ in the whole human body, the brain, and the expression of its activity, the mind. As a scientist-physician, I hope that you are curious about the brain and the mind. Our science explores the mechanisms of the activities of the mind and the way their disruption leads to mental illness. Mental illness often stems from a complex interaction between nature and nurture, spanning from DNA, neurotransmitters and receptors, the neuroanatomical, neurocognitve and neurophysiological domains and extends to the psycho-social domains. Equipping ourselves with these knowledge and to be able to apply them in our everyday practice is crucial if we are to excel in our field. I hope you would maintain this curiosity in your future career.

Some of us may contribute to the science part through research, while others might be more interested in its application. Our clinical practice excels through critical evaluation of empirical research, as well as through continuous sharpening of our own clinical skills. We must remain vigilant and let science and research inform us about best practice. We must keep abreast of new developments, but at the same time fend off pseudoscience and avoid being informed of only part of the truth or a skewed truth. We must continue our quest for knowledge. CME is not just for renewing our specialist registration. Instead, I hope you would see that lifelong learning is imperative in the modern era of medical practice.

There will be times when you find the service setting you are working in demoralising. There are often too many patients and too little time. Our inpatient wards are crowded and there is a lack of personal space. And everything you know tells you that our patients deserve better. However, it is precisely because of these adversities that we must maintain our passion for what we do in order to offer help to our patients, particularly those in need. It is easy to resort to cynicism, therapeutic nihilism, blaming the system, blaming people upstairs for not caring, blaming the society for not accepting mental illnesses, and becoming demoralised and complacent. On the contrary, while doing our best within our constraint to provide the best service we could, we should also be an advocate to engage and lobby the government for a mental health reform.

Your College has been in the process of engaging the government in the past two years to bring about change. As I have mentioned earlier, the increasing number of new Fellows and new recruits into psychiatry is hopefully the beginning of a much-needed change. But calling for greater manpower alone will not be the whole answer. We must be mindful of the larger system that we operate within and we need to have a global view as to what the future mental health service should look like. Within the College, we need to put our own house in order and develop appropriate guidelines and standards as well as facilitating subspecialty development. As mental health professionals, we should play a leading role in research and championing service innovation and improvement. The College has concrete plans as to what these are but we need your help and support to bring these into fruition.

I end here with a quote from the victory speech of the new US President, Barack Obama: “the road ahead will be long, our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year, or even in one term — but [America] I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there." Thank you and congratulations once again. 

Dr. SF Hung

President