Preventing a serious global woe
On Friday, September 9, the Philippines will mark World Suicide Prevention Day, a day ahead of the international observance.
The kickoff activity will be “Fit and Fun,” a fitness walk around the University of the Philippines (UP) Academic Oval. Registration starts at 6 a.m. Another fitness walk will be held at Liwasang Aurora, Quezon City Memorial Circle.
Other activities include healing Mass, candle light memorial walk and concert. Both Ateneo de Manila University and Miriam College will have booths featuring different activities.
Spearheaded by the Natasha Goulbourn Foundation, a nonprofit, nongovernment organization that campaigns to promote better understanding of depression, the observance will be hosted by the Quezon City government, with the cooperation of the Departments of Health and Social Welfare and Development.
A three-part lecture series at 9 a.m. at the fourth floor of the College of Social Science and Philosophy, Palma Hall, UP Diliman, will cover some of these issues.
Dr. Violeta “Bolet” Villaroman-Bautista will discuss “Caring for the Bullies and the Bullied: Turning Our Schools into Peace Zones.”
She will be followed by Dr. Jerry Jurisprudencia who will talk on “Conquering Our Low Moods: Creating Natural Highs in Life.”
The third lecturer is Dr. Aurora Corpuz-Mendoza, who will discuss “Nurturing Resilience: From Healing to Wellness and Wholeness.”
Suicide, often the result of a very deep feeling of depression and a severe sense of helplessness, has become such a serious universal problem that the global community declared September 10 of every year World Suicide Prevention Day.
This year’s World Suicide Prevention Day will showcase the increasingly alarming, but still largely unknown, suicide statistics. It will also call attention to some of the major problems that make people, particularly children, suicidal.
Problems with data
Statistics on the suicide situation in the Philippines may seem dated.
As Dr. Dina Nadera, dean of the University of the Philippines Open University, said, statistics could only be gleaned from data of various, including unlikely, sources like hospitals, police blotters and funeral parlors.
And even then, Nadera said, they could not cover all of the possible sources. For instance, they could only reach some of the country’s thousands of funeral parlors, mainly in Metro Manila and Luzon.
Of course, quite often, too, families would have the cause of death listed as something other than suicide.
So sensitive is the issue, in fact, that in the 2004 Philippine Health Statistics, suicide is euphemistically called “intentional self-harm.”
Nadera cited the results of the 2003 multisectoral Global School-based Student Health Survey (GSSHS) as perhaps the best indicators of how serious a problem suicide was.
In 2003, almost 6,000 Filipino high school students were interviewed for the GSSHS, an initiative of the World Health Organization, a United Nations body.
Nadera said the GSSHS found that almost 20 percent (19.9) of the girls surveyed contemplated suicide during a 12-month period before the survey. Some 12.8 percent of boys had the same thoughts for the same period, an average of 16.8 percent for both sexes.
The Department of Health’s (DoH) 2004 Philippine Health Statistics showed that kids as young as 10 years old were killing themselves. The DoH registered 42 suicides among 10 to 14-year-olds, less than one per 100,000. The figure more than quadrupled, 261, among 15 to 19-year-olds, or three per 100,000. The highest rate was registered in the 20-24 age bracket, 335 suicides.
The Asia Pacific Journal of Public Health in the Philippines reported that five died of suicide every day, about 150 a month.
A 2007 survey of the DoH found that 15 out of 900 teenagers tried to commit suicide.
The number could actually be much higher as many cases were unreported or not recorded as suicide, Nadera said. And the problem, she and other experts agree, is getting worse.
Visit www.ngf-hope.org. E-mail [email protected] or call 897-2217.
If you or someone you know is in need of assistance, please reach out to the National Center for Mental Health (NCMH). Their crisis hotlines are available at 1553 (Luzon-wide landline toll-free), 0917-899-USAP (8727), 0966-351-4518, and 0908-639-2672. For more information, visit their website: (https://doh.gov.ph/NCMH-Crisis-Hotline)
Alternatively, you can contact Hopeline PH at the following numbers: 0917-5584673, 0918-8734673, 88044673. Additional resources are available at ngf-mindstrong.org, or connect with them on Facebook at Hopeline PH.
