Need to arrest it

There is an urgent need to stop the suicidal tendency among our adolescents before it becomes a crisis

SOMETHING is not well with the state of our youth’s mental health. Anecdotal evidence now comes supported by the National Health and Morbidity Survey 2017 (NHMS 2017), the latest to be conducted by the Public Health Institute. The findings raise an alarm: of the 5.5 million youths, half of whom are in schools, 10 per cent have contemplated suicide. Such suicidal behaviour was highest among Form One students with 11.2 per cent contemplating suicide. The numbers are even more worrying for depression: one in five adolescents suffer from this disability. Befrienders KL’s statistics, too, point to an increasing trend of suicidal tendency. In 2015, 5,739 callers to the NGO’s helpline expressed suicidal tendencies. This number grew to 7,446 in 2016. Clearly there is a problem. Perhaps we are not listening enough at home, at schools and universities where close to three million young minds spend most of their time. The NHMS 2017 findings also showed that only a third of the adolescents felt that their parents understood the problems they were up against. They didn’t find peer support forthcoming, either. As result, our young boys and girls are turning to the cyberworld, which is a more inhospitable space.

There is an urgent need to put a stop to this mounting problem among our adolescents before it grows into an unmanageable crisis. Firstly, as parents, we must become better listeners. Because as their loved ones, we are the first line of defence for them. Because, too, they may lack fortitude, as Youth and Sports Minister Syed Saddiq Syed Abdul Rahman put it recently. As parents, we must take heed that only one third of our children feel we are lending our ears to them. Teachers and school authorities must listen more as well. Somewhere in the crowd of a million there may be a lonely adolescent. He may be crying out for help. And we are not noticing it. As a first step, school staff must be trained in mental health “first aid” to spot and counsel students burdened by stress and depression. Not everyone understands depression. Although only a trained professional can counsel one who is suffering from depression, school staff, especially teachers, can play a critical supporting role. They can make the school environment more sensitive to the needs of students with mental issues.

Malaysians’ mindset needs to change too. We tend to treat mental problems as a taboo. We must reach for the reset button. Because shunning those with mental issues will drive them to suicide. Visiting psychiatrists, too, must not be considered a taboo. People in developed nations visit them as a matter of course, though affordability is an issue. Malaysians do not want to be caught seeing a psychiatrist because of the stigma. Even if you decide to visit a psychiatrist, it is not easy to find one. There is only one psychiatrist for every 100,000 Malaysians. The number is even smaller when we consider child and adolescent psychiatrists. The World Health Organisation says we should have one psychiatrist for every 50,000 of us. Depression is predicted to be the leading cause of disability in Malaysia in 2030. We can prevent this from happening if we put our collective mind to it.