Editorial | Behind the suicide attempts

Reports on the National Council on Drug Abuse’s (NCDA) latest survey of students have mostly focused on their access to drugs and how many turn up to school drunk.

The findings, however, highlight a deeper crisis, of which drug use might be one of the symptoms: the deterioration of the mental health of Jamaica’s children, driving some to suicide or to consider taking their own lives.

This, of course, is not a new problem. Nor is it one of which the Jamaican authorities are unaware. Indeed, there are programmes of intervention.

This newspaper’s concern, however, is that the dangers are so great that the situation demands an urgent and deeper national conversation on mental health broadly, but more so on its impact on children and adolescents. At the same time, the government’s current mental-health interventions in schools and communities must be massively scaled up.

Put another way, mental health generally, but more so the mental health of adolescents, should be addressed with the same focus and intensity with which the government attended to macroeconomic stability in the wake of the 2013 economic reform agreement with the International Monetary Fund. Another model is the Jamaica Movement for the Advancement of Literacy adult literacy initiative of the 1970s, when tens of thousands of mostly young, educated Jamaicans were mobilised to teach illiterate Jamaicans to read and write.

The Global School-based Student Health Survey, released last week, was conducted among 3,058 seventh- to 12th-grade students in 32 schools. Typically, the age of students in those grades would range from 13 to 17.

It found that nearly four in 10 students (38.8 per cent) confirmed consuming alcohol, having had at least one drink in the 30 days before the survey. The prevalence among boys and girls was almost equal, at 39.3 per cent and 38.6 per cent, respectively. More than a fifth (21.5 per cent) had consumed enough alcohol to be drunk at least once in their lives.

Additionally, 15.7 per cent said they had used ganja at least once, with the prevalence among girls (17.6 per cent) higher than among boys (13.9 per cent). Four per cent of the sample had used amphetamines or methamphetamines recreationally one or more times.

FRIGHTENING STATISTIC

But the more frightening statistic for The Gleaner’s Editorial Board is the number of adolescents who said they had seriously considered killing themselves and those who actually tried to do so in the 12 months before the survey.

With respect to suicide ideation, nearly three in 10 (28 per cent) said they had seriously considered taking their own lives: 35.1 per cent of girls and 21 per cent of boys.

Of even greater significance is the high proportion of children who moved from the idea of suicide to actually attempting the act. Indeed, 23.8 per cent of the sample admitted to attempting suicide: 27.2 per cent of girls and 21 per cent of boys.

It is not clear what proportion of the sample who reported contemplating killing themselves also made an attempt. It is, however, notable that those who admitted to attempting suicide represented 85 per cent of the reported number who considered it. That correlation is, on its face, significant.

Also significant is the fact that suicide ideation and attempted suicide among adolescents have increased. In 2017, a similar survey found suicide ideation among 25 per cent of respondents, three percentage points below the current rate. Further, fewer than one in 10 (8.8 per cent) admitted to attempting suicide.

SERIOUS ATTENTION

If neither the survey methodology nor the interpretation of the data is flawed, the near tripling of suicide attempts in approximately a decade is a striking increase worthy of serious attention. Indeed, at the current rate of suicide attempts among school-aged children, Jamaica would be between two and two-and-a-half times higher than global averages and significantly higher than most regional peers.

“The mental health state of our adolescents is declining,” said Uki Atkinson, the NCDA’s acting director for public education and treatment.

That much is clear. Society knows, or has a strong instinctive sense of, much of what accounts for this. The issue now is to translate that understanding into effective solutions.