Youth Mental Health Awareness and Suicide Prevention
Ireland has the fourth highest teen suicide rate in the EU/OECD
Youth Suicide Prevention Ireland has been working for over 10 years to provide free education and training services to schools and colleges around Ireland. According to the World Health Organisation's 2016 report suicide is the 2nd highest cause of death amongst young people across the World. Sadly Ireland is not spared from this problem which affects almost every community in the country.
In the European Union during 2015, according to Eurostat, there were approximately 56,000 reported deaths by suicide making it one of the leading causes of death. Males accounted for 43,000 of those deaths or 76%.
According to research by UNICEF published in 2017 Ireland has the fourth highest teen suicide rate in the EU/OECD region. The organisation's latest report card on well-being of young people found that Ireland's suicide rate amongst adolescents aged 15 to 19 was 10.3 per 100,000 population and ranks well above the national country average of 6.1 per 100,000.
Parents are so important to the development of personality, social skills and self-worth in a young person. In ideal world they would always be the first people a teenager turns to when they are in distress but for any number of reasons this is not what normally happens.
In this guide we will try and give adults, and particularly parents, an overview of youth mental health with an emphasis on suicide awareness and prevention, the issues that young people have to deal with and the warning signs that they are not coping with the issues facing them.
