HE WAS “STITCHED up in A&E, given a month’s prescription and sent home” – how one family were treated by a hospital shortly before their son died by suicide.
Another family were sent to a different hospital with a note that read: “Sorry, not our area”.
These accounts were published in a report launched today that looked at the experiences of 104 families affected by suicide.
The report revealed the extent of humiliation and dissatisfaction families felt with statutory services in Ireland, with 66 per cent reporting a negative experience when dealing with health services. One in five reporting dissatisfaction with the justice services, while eight per cent of families affected by suicide had a bad experience with education services.
Other accounts of the services included criticism of trained gardaí, with one family having to console a young garda sent to the scene of their son’s suicide death. Another family were told that their daughter “would have been hospitalised if she had VHI”.
One family recalled how a best friend of a suicide victim was arrested for six hours after he found his friend’s body. In another instance, a suicidal young man who later took his life, was arrested on a bridge “to teach him a lesson”, the family said.
We’re “going to take his brain out” one family was told by telephone. They added: ”They gave it back to us five months later in a box.”
The report also contains negative ratings about coroners’ inquests where up to eight different families endured the details of their cases at the same sitting in the court.
When it came to lack of satisfaction in education, one family told the research team that their son was “beaten up” by one of his teachers, which was seen to be a contributing factor in his eventual suicide.
Other reports included students having been subjected to humiliation such as “being placed in junior classes” and in another instance having a student’s private journal retained as a “threat”.
The project also found that up to 50 per cent of under-18 suicide deaths in Ireland may be part of couplets or clusters.
“A young suicide death is a very powerful and destabilising social force. It can reverberate intensely in smaller closed communities. The whole community is at increased risk for at least a year, and also at anniversaries,” said Prof Kevin Malone, research leader. “We have to place cluster-busting in our suicide prevention agenda.”
Recommendations from the report suggest there should be an early detection adolescent depression screening programme and a real-time monitoring of teen and young adult suicide in Ireland.
The report, ‘Suicide in Modern Ireland’ was launched at the Royal College of Physicians in Ireland today.
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