Senator: Suicide policy not working

GOVERNMENT policy on suicide is flawed and must be radically overhauled as it is not working, the Seanad will hear today.

Speaking ahead of a debate in the upper house, Labour TD for Cork John Gilroy, who worked in psychiatric services for 20 years, said Reach Out, a policy document launched in 2005 and which runs to 2014, must be reviewed.

He said many of the useful parts to the document had never been implemented, such as finding a better way of recording suicides other than CSO figures, which do not appear until over a year later.

“At the moment our knowledge on the patterns of death by suicide is based on CSO data which is informed by the Garda forms. There is still no central place dedicated to collecting proper statistics. So if we don’t even know the scale of the problem how can we hope to address it.”

Suicide rates have been increasing, with 2009 seeing the most ever. According to Mr Gilory, who works with suicide prevention groups in the community, anecdotal evidence was that suicide was increasing.

“I hope I am wrong, but from what I hear on the ground, it seems like suicide rates are going up. The problem is we won’t have figures for 2011 until much later; there is also an issue with undetermined deaths many of which are suicide.”

He called for an urgent and immediate review of Reach Out.

“This document has 96 recommendations and 27 of those must be reviewed and evaluated. Six years later how much has been done?”

He said research was the key to understanding and solving the problem and criticised cuts to a research project linked to the coroner’s court in Cork. Research by the National Suicide Research Foundation found that between September 2008 and March 2010 there were 18 deaths by suicide in one area. Links between the deaths were only uncovered after interviews carried out by a special research team, the Suicide Support and Information System (SSIS).

“The SSIS had its funding cut last year. That to me doesn’t make sense.”