The main problem faced by these minors, generally male and with good school performance, is bullying from their classmates at school, generally with psychological and physical aggression.
suicidal behaviors They also appear in childhoodin the strip that goes from 6 to 10 years, but they go unnoticed by their environment. Until It takes a year for little ones to ask for help. and express their extreme suffering, a time that takes longer when it comes to going to the psychologist, where 4 out of 10 go.
The psychologist and director of programs of the ANAR Foundation (Aid to Children and Adolescents at Risk), Benjamín Ballesteros, who appeals to parents to know how to communicate with their children and spend quality time with them“not with the mobile in hand”, so that they know that they are loved and accepted because suicide is preventable and suicidal behavior is a symptom of another problem that lies behind it.
And it is that those twelve months or more of lost time suppose, according to this expert, a real risk of the child committing the attempt because children under 10 years of age are one of the most vulnerable groups since they lack the ability to solve the problem on their own, and the trauma they go through can accompany them for the rest of their lives.
Ballesteros points out that The main problem faced by these children, generally boys and with good school performance, is the Bullying from their classmates at school, generally with psychological and physical aggression, which generates depression, anxiety, social withdrawal, behavioral disorders and even eating and sleeping disorders.
From ANAR they emphasize that there are solutions and the minor, with the help of a professional, can recover his self-esteem and get out of the “tunnel vision” in which he is installed.
Vulnerable groups
As of 2019, the ANAR Foundation has described four vulnerable groups: children under 10 years of age, migrants, the LGTBI community and minors with disabilities.
In the case of the youngest and according to the latest report from the ANAR Foundation, from 2019 to August 2022, 203 cases of suicidal behaviors have been detected in the 6 to 10-year-old age group, which includes ideation and attempt.
This figure represents the 3.3% of the total cases recorded in those under 18 years of age in the last three and a half years.
Ballesteros recalls that it is not a minor figure, and underlines the importance of the family, although he admits the problem that this entails when there is high conflict in the environment with intra-family violence.
This psychologist insists that when the child arrives at the consultation “He has been suffering for more than a year.” “We, the psychologists, take the information provided by their environment as a reference, but we also give them the opportunity to verbalize what is happening,” he says.
It can be with the drawing or the game. In the first case, the minor expresses his suicidal ideation by drawing his family but canceling himself, without his presence, or a symbolic child “who goes to heaven” to express that he wants to die. You have to create a warm climate in the consultation, give them tools and make them understand that their problem is solved.
From the age of 9 call the help lines
In an interview with Efe, the psychiatrist and member of the Child Psychiatry Society, Pedro Javier Rodríguez, underlines the difficulty of younger children in separating fact from fiction and the overexposure of information caused by the pandemicwith continuous alarm of deaths and infections and the message of a collapsing society.
Rodríguez points out that the understanding that death is an irreversible phenomenon for which one must worry arrives around 6 or 7 years of age, depending on the level of development.
This child psychiatrist admits that the signs of suicidal behavior are often unclear, “they overlap” and it takes time to recognize the symptoms, “to intervene you have to investigate first”.
He adds that the time in which these suicidal ideations or attempts are detected is highly variable since “it depends on the intensity of the symptoms and the speed at which they are generated, but it also depends on the expertise of the professionals.”
Rodríguez comments that from 9 and 10 years old they can call the help lines (in ANAR, the telephones 900 202010 and 600 505152) but in general it is done by the minor’s environment, who probes what is happening.
This psychiatrist assures that the increase in the tendency of suicidal behavior in minors is not only in Spain, it occurs in all Western countries and to stop it, he is committed to a national suicide prevention plan with the most material and human resources at the outpatient and hospital level. , which in the case of the mental health of children and adolescents are well below the EU ratio.
Toxicology
The Information Service of the National Institute of Toxicology, which registered an increase in telephone inquiries about voluntary poisoning and suicide attempts, has warned that these behaviors occur at very early ages: in more than 20% of the cases the affected person was between 11 and 15 years.
According to the annual report of the service, throughout 2021 a total of 75,677 queries were answered by phone, 58,443 of them related to human poisoning.
In addition, the report reveals that the majority of consultations for suicide attempts corresponded to women (67.8%) and in the vast majority of voluntary poisonings medications predominated, present in almost 87% of calls.