IN JULY, a senior Health Service Executive (HSE) official told the Oireachtas sub-committee on suicide that it was "very, very difficult to say" whether the Government's target of reducing suicides by 20 per cent can be achieved by the set date of 2012. The latest grim figures on suicide and self-harm seem to suggest that pessimism is justified.
Provisional data from the Central Statistics Office indicate that the number of recorded suicides rose to 460 last year, from 409 in 2006. While this does represent a small drop in the suicide rate - due to the rise in the population - the rise in the absolute numbers in still disturbing. This is especially so since the real figure may be, as Dan Neville TD suggests, closer to 600.
At the same time, figures from the National Registry of Deliberate Self Harm showed that a total of 8,600 people presented to hospital last year in 11,100 incidences of deliberate self-harm - a rise of 2 per cent on the previous year. This figure is a particular cause for gloom because it breaks what had seemed to be an encouraging trend. The previous three years had shown what seemed to be a consistent downward trend.
The increase in self-harm is all the more worrying because it is heavily concentrated among younger people. The male age group most at risk of self-harm is 20 to 24. Not only, however, is self-harm a more serious problem among women but is particularly pronounced in the 15 to 19 age group. One adolescent girl in every 165 is now being treated in hospital each year as a result of deliberate self harm. Given the close relationship between self-harm and suicide, these figures would tend to suggest that the suicide problem is set to get worse, not better.
None of this, however, justifies a simplistic conclusion that suicide prevention strategies are failing and that there is nothing much the State can do about this agonising problem. The international evidence is that it takes about a decade for such strategies to have a real effect. Recent studies have shown that the large-scale investment in mental health promotion and suicide prevention made in Australia from 1995 onwards had a dramatic effect by 2005. There was a 50 per cent decrease over that period in suicides among young people aged between 15 and 24 - the age group in which Ireland has the worst figures of any country in western Europe.
Distressing as this week's figures undoubtedly are, we need to hold our nerve. The implementation of Reach Out, the national suicide prevention strategy, began only in 2006, and it would be unrealistic to expect a significant impact so soon. Investment in the National Office for Suicide Prevention, at just €12 million over the last four years, is extremely modest, and its annual budget is €2 million short of the recommended level. The Oireachtas sub-committee was told in July that three of the 11 regional suicide officer posts were still vacant.
The message of this week's statistics, therefore, is not that there is nothing we can do but that we have to increase our commitment to doing what we can.