Suicide rates would tumble if 18-year-olds were no longer able to buy drink legally, US expert claims
The Government should raise the legal age at which alcohol can be purchased from 18 to 21 to curb the rate of youth suicides in the State, a US expert said yesterday.
Prof David Shaffer, head of child and adolescent psychiatry at Columbia University in New York, said that raising the age at which alcohol could be bought and consumed in the US had a significant effect on suicide rates among adolescents.
He told a conference at Dublin's Mater Hospital that it had resulted in a 12 per cent lowering of suicide rates. He noted that suicide rates among young people in the US had been tumbling over the last 10 years, while in Ireland the rates had increased and the country now had an "enormous problem" with youth suicide.
Alcohol consumption in the Republic was likely to be the "prime suspect", he said, adding that there was lots of evidence that alcohol was an important contributor to suicide. "I imagine the secularisation of Ireland must also play some role," he said.
Prof Shaffer added that recent studies in the US had found that up to 10 per cent of high school students attempted suicide, but only in 25 per cent of cases would this have led to a medical intervention. Therefore, most at- tempts were hidden and were only found during screening programmes, which he felt should be introduced in all schools. Screening now takes place in 40 states in the US.
The findings of a recent study among 12/15-year-olds in eight secondary schools in Dublin, published earlier this year, also found that young people with depressive disorders here were not being picked up and referred for treatment.
This study found that 20 per cent of the students were at risk of mental illness and that 4 per cent had attempted suicide. However, few were attending child and adolescent mental health services, but 22 out of 723 had been referred for help after the study. A total of 17 of the students had ticked a box in the questionnaire stating: "I want to kill myself."
One of the authors of the study, Dr Fionnuala Lynch, said that she found the presence of depressive disorders to be related to unhealthy family functioning, a history of being bullied and regular use of alcohol.
She added that 40 children under the age of 15 had died by suicide in Ireland over the past 10 years - treble the rate of the previous decade.
Apart from alcohol use, Prof Shaffer said some US studies had shown that a family history of suicide and poor communication with a father increased the risk of adolescent suicides. The biggest trigger of suicide clusters was a suicide which had been highly publicised.
He said that increased prescribing of anti-depressants among young people had brought down suicide rates in many places, including the US and Scandinavia. This was also something Ireland could look at, but the vulnerable young people would first have to be identified so that they could be treated.