Underestimated suicide risk in adolescents

Suicide is one of the leading causes of death in adolescents

06/22/2012

Suicide is one of the leading causes of death among adolescents worldwide. Every year hundreds of thousands of young people take their own lives. Recent studies suggest that so far the number of suicides among adolescents has been significantly underestimated.

The science magazine „The Lancet“ is dedicated to the latest findings on suicide in a three-part series. The distribution of suicides among young people is the focus of the contributions. Like Professor Keith Hawton and Kate Saunders from the Department of Psychiatry at Oxford University in their article „Self-injury and suicide in adolescents“ report is „Suicide is the second most common cause of death among young people worldwide.“

Strong differences in the development of the suicide rate
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), almost one million people worldwide die each year. The development has been quite different during the last decades in the different states. For example, in Germany, the number of suicides has been declining since the 1970s, while other countries such as Brazil, Ireland, Lithuania or Singapore had recently recorded sharply rising suicide rates. „Although the suicide rate among young men has fallen in some high-income countries since the 1990s, rates in certain regions, ethnic and socioeconomic groups remain within those nations where incomes have fallen“, particularly high, the researchers around Dr. Alexandra Pitman from University College London report in the article „Suicide in young men ".

High number of unreported cases of suicides worldwide
While Dr. Pitman and colleagues explicitly dedicated to suicides in young men, the study published by Professor Keith Hawton and Kate Saunders on the overall development of suicide rates in adolescents. According to Hawton and Saunders, the actual numbers of suicides are well above official WHO estimates, as in many countries suicide is considered a crime and is therefore often concealed in order to avoid negative consequences for relatives. In addition, self-harm without death should not be ignored, according to the researchers, because around ten percent of adolescents have deliberately injured themselves.

Suicide in India on the way to the number one cause of death
Overall, according to the researchers, female adolescents are more likely to commit suicide than young men. For example, suicide is now the leading cause of death among young women, but even among young men, suicides are the second most frequent cause of death, behind behind traffic accidents and violent crimes. Exemplifying the development in relatively low-income countries, researchers led by Vikram Patel from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine describe the evolution of the disease „Suicide deaths in India“. In emerging markets, suicide is on its way to becoming the number one killer of women, but Indian men are also more likely to commit suicide, according to research by Patel and colleagues. According to the study director, die „by suicide almost as many male Indians between the ages of 15 and 29 as in traffic accidents and almost as many young women as by complications in pregnancy and childbirth.“ While in the European states divorced or widowed women are often more at risk, in India, as in China, they tend to commit suicide comparatively less frequently than married couples.

Possibilities for the prevention of suicides
The possibilities of prevention were discussed by the scientists around Professor Paul Yip from the University of Hong Kong in the paper „Importance of the restriction for suicide prevention“. Of course, proper psychotherapeutic accompaniment plays an essential role here, but according to Prof. Paul Yip, access to possible sources of suicide should also be made more difficult, for example by barriers on bridges and the restriction of the supply of insecticides. „Most people believe that those who want to commit suicide find a means“, however, restrictions on access in the past have significantly reduced the suicide rate in some countries, Yip explained. Better would be prevention by avoiding the suicide triggers, but for this the data on the causes of suicides and injuries is too low, according to the researchers. Also, there are hardly any scientific findings on why comparatively many young people willfully violate themselves during puberty and when self-injury becomes an attempt at suicide. (Fp)

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Image: Christoph Aron (pixelmaster-x)