At only 18 years old, Laura Schuh decided, with great courage, to share her story. She explains that before the coronavirus crisis, she already suffered from depressive disorders but pushed them away. When the pandemic broke out, she lived with her family in a small village in Lower Austria and said that confinement, social isolation and distance learning courses gradually made her sink.
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“The first three weeks were really horrible, I started self-harming, then it got to the point where I decided to kill myself, because I didn’t want to feel pain anymore. I then told my parents, they were totally in shock. We have decided that I will not go to psychiatry because with the coronavirus crisis, we were afraid that I would not have the right to visits. But then I came this close to trying again. So we called my psychiatrist and I spent two months in a psychiatric ward,” she explains.
Initially, very few people in her village and in her family knew that she was in psychiatry. She is the one who will gradually talk about it to those around her, hoping to break a taboo.
Laura Schuh says she did not hesitate to participate in this prevention campaign on the mental health of young people across Austria, and hopes to help young people talk about it and raise awareness among adults. In particular in the world of education, of which there is too little question. The situation is also particularly alarming after two years of pandemic: a study published by the University of Krems, in north-eastern Austria, 5 months ago, shows that one in two young people has depressive symptoms. and that one in six young people have repeated suicidal thoughts.
Faced with the urgency of the situation, the idea of this awareness campaign took the form of an official online petition, supported in particular by the Order of Physicians of Austria. “Today, there are not enough specialized doctors and there are too few professionals capable of caring for pupils in schools. Improving this will cost money, but you can’t afford to save money in this area“, assures Thomas Szekeres, the president of the local order.
In seven days, the online petition has collected more than 100,000 signatures, the threshold necessary for the subject to be debated in parliament, which should be the case in the coming weeks. Today, the campaign team and Laura Schuh hope that the public authorities hear this message and finally take measures to meet the situation.