Teen suicide almost doubled in one decade

The Irish Times - Tuesday, August 16, 2011

 

 

Research finds two children a month are taking their lives, writes JOANNE HUNT 

SUICIDE AMONG Irish children has almost doubled in a decade, a new survey has found.

The Suicide in Ireland survey, conducted by UCD professor of psychiatry Kevin Malone, included speaking to the families of 83 people aged under 35 who died by suicide, 14 of whom were children younger than 18.
Prof Malone reviewed CSO data comparing the years 1993-1998 and 2003-2008 to reveal the dramatic rise in suicides among children over the decade.
“The data shows there was a 40 per cent increase in the rate of suicide in 15- to 17-year-old boys and the rate has doubled in girls aged under 18,” he said. In terms of the rate per 100,000, Prof Malone said there was an increase from 9.3 boys aged 15-17 annually in the 1990s to 13.5 boys a decade later.
With regard to girls under 18, he said there was an increase from 2.6 girls in the 1990s to 5.1 girls annually a decade later, and he described the figures for girls as “conservative”.
The rate of suicide among children under 15 has also doubled, he found.
“You’re talking about almost two children a month taking their lives in Ireland,” said Prof Malone. He said of those children who had contact with mental health services, “their mental-health issues were being shoehorned into an adult service environment”.
From interviews with families of children with no history of mental illness, he says, “all of them had experienced some type of significant humiliation in the six months prior to their death – either being bullied by a peer, an authority figure or being exposed to some kind of significant personal assault.”
With one in five of the children having reported some form of bullying, he said “there was an over-representation of people who have been bullied”.
Of those suffering personal assault, he says it was often a robbery of a mobile phone or passport – “something that strips their identity or humiliates them in some way”.
Prof Malone added that almost half of the children who died had been exposed to one or more peer suicides in the previous six months. “Two of them were part of one cluster, but otherwise they were all part of separate clusters.”
With a minority of the children having “a definable mental illness”, he said the problem of child suicide was not just one for the Department of Health but for society as a whole.
“Ireland has the largest cohort of under-18s in the EU, so this whole group is moving over the next decade through a period where we have an increased risk of suicide. That makes it all the more urgent that we address it.” http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/health/2011/0816/1224302518682.html