Students must hear message of resilience: suicide prevention expert

Five University of Ottawa students have died by suicide in the past 10 months

OTTAWA – The campus community should share stories about resilience in the wake of the suicide deaths of five University of Ottawa students in the past 10 months, says an expert in suicide prevention and contagion.

“People who die by suicide are tragic outliers. The message has to be, ‘The overwhelming number of people who have mental health struggles or suicidal thoughts survive, and you can survive, too,’ ” said Dr. Mark Sinyor, a psychiatrist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto.

“We have to be clear that there is help and you can seek help.”

Earlier this week, the university informed students of the weekend death of an unidentified student. University president and vice-chancellor Jacques Frémont called the situation a crisis and asked students to seek support if they were struggling or had a peer who was having difficulties.

The five deaths in the university community were all tragedies, but the most important message now should be one of hope, Sinyor said.

“The whole goal is to say, ‘No one needs to die by suicide,’ ” said Sinyor, whose research has used coroners’ records and other data sources to examine thousands of suicide deaths across the province.

The vast majority of people don’t act on suicidal thoughts and don’t die. This has to be made clear, he said. “At this stage, the big thing is to ensure that other people don’t follow this example.”

Sinyor cautions against referring to the five deaths as a “cluster” of suicides. This is only true in cases where people knew each other, which isn’t known in the uOttawa cases.

He also cautions against using the term “crisis”. It can be a self-fulfilling term, he said.

While it is important to treat this situation seriously, he also urges contextualizing suicide deaths.

The suicide rate is about 11 deaths per year for every 100,000 people. The uOttawa had enrolment of a little more than 43,000 last fall. While every one of the five suicide deaths in 10 months was a tragedy, that number is not statistically unusual in a community with more than 40,000 people, he said.

Psychiatrist Dr. Mark Sinyor is an expert in suicide prevention and suicide contagion. Credit: Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre jpg

Sinyor stresses that everyone needs to have a “distress management plan.”

“Suicide prevention is about talking to people about feelings and recognizing that everyone may be in distress at some point, and needs an action plan,” he said.

A distress management plan is similar to the common-sense plan most people have when they develop a cold.

If cold symptoms are not too serious, a reasonable course of action is to stay at home and drink plenty of fluids. If symptoms get worse, visit a doctor or an emergency room. The same is true of a personalized distress management plan that has a hierarchy of steps effective for each individual — talk to a friend first, for example, as the first step. If the distress is more serious, talk to a counsellor.

The goal is to make people feel empowered. And although it is appropriate for the university to take this situation seriously, the onus can’t be entirely on the university — that inadvertently positions people as helpless, said Sinyor.