Milly: a death beyond reason

Milly Tuomey’s shocking suicide shows that children have been left behind by the mental health movement, writes Donal Lynch

MILLY Tuomey was a beautiful child, the kind that you might expect to see in a film or in an ad campaign. Her cherubic looks should have been beside the point last week but her unhappiness with them gave the story of her suicide another disturbing texture. Her youth was the most shocking part of all, however.

We have, through some famous cases over the years, absorbed the idea of teen suicide, but the idea of an 11-year-old killing themselves is almost beyond comprehension. And yet, according to psychiatrist Dr Antoinette D’Alton, who addressed the coroner’s court during Milly’s case last week, suicidal ideation is “increasing in children as young as seven”.

Even in a country where suicide among adults has bedded down to become a sort of accepted scourge, this was a shocking, stark statement. And in it contained a terrible riddle: one of the biggest social changes in Irish society over the past 40 years — at least on the surface — has been bringing children from the ‘seen and not heard’ fringes to the heart of society. They have their own government minister. Their fathers take a much bigger role in their upbringings. They are cherished like never before. How, one might wonder, has all of this also been paralleled by a huge increase in the number of young people feeling depressed and, in some cases, killing themselves?

Cold comfort can be taken in the fact that we are not alone with this problem. An increase in child suicide has been seen across the board in European countries: Ireland falls roughly in the middle of the table (three years ago we had the highest rates). This year the rate of child suicide hit a 14-year high in the UK.

In the US the number of hospitalisations of children due to suicidality and serious self-harm has doubled in the past decade, according to a study published earlier this year, and had been steadily increasing since the 1960s. Researchers there have found that female children are more likely to attempt suicide but male children are more likely to die. Suicide rates for both genders spike in the autumn and spring when the pressures of returning to school and of facing into exams are at their highest, and various factors such as family history of depression, race, and whether the child suspects they might be gay, can all play a role in how vulnerable he or she will be to suicide.

The great imponderable is which other, broader developments in modern life make suicide seem like an increasingly viable option for some young people.

In the aftermath of Milly’s death, there has been much discussion about the role of social media in the lives of young people and the responsibilities of the operators of those sites. In recent years we have seen several prominent examples of other Irish children taking their own lives in response to online bullying, but Milly’s case made clear that this is not the only danger the internet presents to young people.

She had posted her intention to take her own life on Instagram and seems to have fallen victim to the toxic idealism of that site: at one point she wrote “beautiful girls don’t eat”. The tragedy was that at 11 she was too young to remember a world without social media. She lived at a time before tech giants have been held to account for the mental health consequences of their products.

There is a natural alarm with a child that age holding themselves up to an adult standard of attractiveness, but there is also evidence that biologically and psychologically childhood has been abbreviated. We know that girls go through puberty on average one year earlier than they did half-a-century ago and the pressures on them to grow up quickly are greater.

The actress Emma Watson, who grew up in the public eye, recently said that she found it “amazing how self-aware people are becoming as a result of constantly posting images on Facebook and Instagram. They’re blissfully unaware their childhoods are being shortened. That period of time when you’re not self-conscious is sped up”.

And how could our children not be self-conscious when they spend their childhood with a camera phone pointed in their face?

As these pressures have increased, the supports to counterbalance them have not materialised. Adults are bewildered about the effects of the new technologies and seldom understand how their children use them.

The national awakening about mental health has also left children behind. One of the most heart-rending aspects of Milly’s case was the huge efforts her parents made to get her professional help. The shameful gaps in services were laid bare as it emerged that at one point she had been assigned to an art therapist. Proper psychiatric services for children still don’t really exist in this country. As with homelessness, the responsibility has been shunted to private organisations and charities.

Milly’s mother highlighted that Irish GPs are not required to be trained in spotting red flags for suicidal ideation. She has founded a support group, HUGG, which she hopes will provide “a point of information and a suicide authority to ring-fence services and prevent gaps, to prevent others going through what we have gone through”.

Perhaps another key lesson we can learn from the death of Milly and other children like her, is that child suicide does not exist in a vacuum. The increase in child suicide figures over the past few decades has been mirrored by an even bigger increase in adult suicide. In fact, seen in the context of figures which present suicide as the biggest killer of young men in this country, the relative rarity of child suicide, rather than its frequency, is the most striking thing.

It is naive to think that we can insulate young people from this epidemic. Children are more resilient than adults, but they can only live in the world that we create. And for their sake, and the sake of children such as Milly, it is clear that simply ‘accepting’ our national scourge is no longer an option.

‘Another key lesson is that child suicide does not exist in a vacuum’