Starting today, for two days, a 45-seat bus is parked in the front yard of a village hall on Baengnyeongdo. It is the "Peace of Mind Bus," specially built as a counseling space with the seats removed. Incheon is opening a "mobile mental health counseling room" for residents of Baengnyeongdo in Ongjin County, where people can receive stress screenings and psychological counseling.
On the first day there are two stops, the Yeonhwa 3-ri village hall and the Bukpo-ri public parking lot, and on the second day the Baengnyeong Community Welfare Center. The stops were divided up to mean that the service goes deep into the villages.
About 4,800 people live on Baengnyeongdo. It is the largest island in Incheon, but there is no proper counseling facility to turn to when things get hard. Getting counseling means taking a boat. So an arrangement like this one, where counseling crosses over to the island, effectively becomes the first point of contact.
Incheon also pointed out that Baengnyeongdo is a military border area. Residents experience tension and anxiety whenever the security situation is shaken, according to the city.
This is not the first attempt. Incheon has run counseling services on a rotation through islands such as Jangbongdo, Deokjeokdo and Yeonpyeongdo, where medical and mental health services are hard to reach. Baengnyeongdo is part of the same program. Shin Byung-chul, director of Incheon's Health and Welfare Bureau, stated the city's position on the program.
Incheon said it would widen the scope to vulnerable areas where mental health services are hard to come by, such as permanent rental apartment complexes and community welfare centers. A living-area-centered approach, under which people should be able to receive counseling within the neighborhood where they live, is also being proposed on the research side.
In Pohang, the Buk-gu Mental Health and Welfare Center met with students at Sunlin University on the 4th and the 8th. An aromatherapy healing program for those at high risk of suicide and gatekeeper training that helps people notice the signals of those around them were held together. In the background is Pohang's age-standardized suicide rate for 2024, 27.1 per 100,000 people, above the national average of 24.6.
Two days of operation will not fill the island's mental health gap. What remains is the question of who people are connected to after the counseling ends, and how.
