“How do you escape a child? Where is the flaw? »
This heartbreaking question posed by Carole Thibodeau, bereaved of her jovial and sunny Kelly Ann, who died at 14, sums up in itself the extent of the work that remains to be done in terms of suicide among our young people. The statistics may have weakened under the impetus of various concerted measures, but we still have a long way to go to tighten the safety net. And it is all the more crucial to tackle it now that the growth of emotional distress in this age group follows the opposite curve.
The toxic legacy of a pandemic that refuses to die out, coupled with a merciless digital age on bodies and minds, especially those of the youngest, this distress is well documented. It hits hard a youth that we have the indolence to leave very often on the service road to alleviate the most urgent. However, if there is one damning element that emerges from the investigation of our reporter Jessica Nadeau, who went through the files of the 546 minors who took their own lives in Quebec since the year 2000, it is the value of the time, precisely. For some, this time will stretch unduly between the moment when the distress begins to nest and its permanent installation. Until the worst.
Coupled with persistent service disruptions, as chronic as they are despairing, this wasted time feeds a dangerous internal enemy: the phenomenon of revolving doors. In mental health, it is a scourge that tirelessly makes headlines. A few days ago, he had the features of Amélie Champagne, 22, whose unappeased distress moved the whole of Quebec.
One would think that our children and our teenagers, at such a founding age, are more sheltered. He is nothing. On the list that Quebec updates each week, young people make up nearly a third of the 20,793 people who were waiting for mental health care on Tuesday. They therefore weigh much more heavily than their demographic weight. And this figure does not take into account all the families, impossible to count, who, by dint of shouting in the desert, have turned their disappointed hopes towards a private one also overloaded.
Disturbing are also these too rare figures which refuse to encompass an evil largely overflowing from first and second line admissions. The coroners, file after file, however, recall the need to know the enemy in its finest details. Finer ventilation has been called for for decades. There is no reason to tolerate such vagueness.
Without the patient exercise of To have to, we do not know to what extent children placed under the Department of Youth Protection (59 out of the 546 cases examined, i.e. nearly 11%) and young Aboriginal people (one in five young Quebecers who died by suicide were aboriginal) are overrepresented in this sad picture. For them, however, it would be necessary to multiply the appropriate approaches.
Our survey also shows that some electroshocks administered over the years have been in vain among young people. A congruent part of their life is tied and undone online. However, the resources there are still embryonic. There is therefore a serious catching up to be done on this level. Including a ruthless showdown to win against Google, which, when an Internet user enters the word “suicide” in the search bar, stubbornly directs him to a Canadian telephone line that does not work in Quebec.
Our review fortunately shows great victories. Thus, boys, who were overrepresented compared to girls, have seen this gap decrease in recent years. The measures put in place speak to them just and well, and that’s good. But we should not neglect girls, for whom there is a resurgence in sight to the point where the INSPQ observed last January that it is among them that the number of emergency room visits for suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts has increased. the most increased.
The CAQ government has shown real sensitivity by proposing a solid national suicide prevention strategy and by appointing a delegate minister to whom it has thus given space to confront this monster. Let’s hope that, in his puzzle to fit all his elected ministers, François Legault will also provide this time for forces reserved for mental health. And, above all, that it will equip them with weapons equal to the challenges that await them.
We have the impression that our young people have their lives ahead of them. It’s true, but they already bear stigma (hello, the climate crisis; hello, inflation; hello, online harassment) that we tend to trivialize and which require a much more sophisticated arsenal. Since it was once decreed that we no longer want our loved ones to live and die in indignity, it is high time that a similar line was drawn on mental health. Because living and dying in distress is equally unacceptable.