ANDREW GIOANNETTI
TEACHERS, now more than ever, are the first in line to detect mental-health issues such as depression among teenage students, who now fall under two groups most vulnerable to suicidal tendencies.
Dr Varma Deyalsingh, a private psychiatrist, said teachers can play a more important role than doctors by identifying problem signs early on.
Deyalsingh spoke with Newsday on the occasion of World Suicide Prevention Month.
He said in spite of vacancies at the Ministry of Education’s (MOE) Student Support Services Division, counsellors and psychologists in the system, as well as a number of state-subsidised and voluntary non-governmental organisations (NGOs), are willing and able to provide the children with support.
The much larger problem, he says, is the stigma attached to depression and other mental-health challenges that prevent children, young adults, and even their parents, from using these support services.
Citing trends identified by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), Deyalsingh said, “We see the older peak, people older than 65, the isolated male, they’re not employed; the isolated female (whose) children moved out of the home (empty nest syndrome), the husband died – but then we notice that peak where you have 15-30-year-olds presenting with a great deal of depression.”
WHO and PAHO, he said, had been trying “to nudge the health administrators worldwide to prepare for what they referred to as a tsunami of depression that we are seeing globally (compounded by the covid19 pandemic).
“What got us worried is when they said that the second highest cause of death in 15-29-year-olds would be suicide globally.”In successive generations, he said, younger and younger people were seeking help for depression.
[caption id="attachment_974939" align="alignnone" width="960"] Among the many factors contributing to depression in adolescents are: cyber-bullying, poverty; parents expecting too much from their children in terms of academics; too-strict parenting and toxic households (emotional abuse).
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During a joint select committee hearing on Social Services and Public Administration chaired by Paul Richards in March, committee member Sen Avinash Singh revealed that at least nine secondary schoolchildren diagnosed with clinical depression have died by suicide since 2019.
Singh stressed the need to fill the vast number of vacancies – approximately 225 – in the Ministry of Education’s (MOE) Student Support Services Division.
The number of children seeking support rose sharply during the covid19 pandemic with the closure of schools and the implementation of other stringent public health measures keeping young people indoors for prolonged periods.
Although suicide is still a local and global problem, deaths by suicide in TT are in decline overall, in contrast to Guyana, which faces the world’s second highest suicide rate, with 40.3 deaths per 100,000 people.
So why is this region particularly vulnerable?
“(It’s primarily) the E
