A woman who lost both her parents in a suicide pact appealed yesterday for more research into the issue of suicide among older people.
Joan Seabrook, who travelled from Canada to attend the world congress of the International Association for Suicide Prevention in Killarney, said up until now suicide among older people was an area people had not addressed or talked about much.
More attention also has to be paid to depression among older people in terms of both identifying it and providing supports for those who required it, she said.
Her parents were aged 68 and 69 when they ended their lives 15 years ago. Ms Seabrook said they were "happily retired" and the family had no indication anything was amiss. Their deaths came as a total shock. "It was very devastating for the extended family and for the grandchildren and for all of the siblings," she said.
"It was a suicide pact where they both agreed that they were ready to quit life," she explained.
Ms Seabrook, who is now on the board of directors of the Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention, suspects in hindsight that her parents may have been depressed and the family did not see the signs and symptoms.
Prof Brian Draper from the Department of Old Age Psychiatry at the University of New South Wales in Australia told delegates education was key to tackling suicide among older age groups.
"And the education isn't necessarily about suicide. It can include that, but it's about destigmatising being old, destigmatising having a mental disorder, helping people understand what is normal and what's not normal in old age. There are a lot of perceptions that it's normal to be old and unhappy and depressed when in fact that's not the case. Most older people are not unhappy and depressed. Most older people are in fact in the best mental health of their life. When they are unhappy and depressed it's often because of the mounting circumstances of physical ill-health, of social isolation, threats of being put into an old persons home that they don't want to go to . . . that are leading to them being at risk and then of course only a very small proportion of people who get into that situation then are at real risk of suicide," he said.
He added that depression in older people was under recognised and under treated but the focus for preventing suicide in this age group should focus on preventing the things that lead to depression among them in the first place.
"We need to have a healthy older persons framework for life . . . you are going to reduce suicide in older people by improving the quality of life of older people by encouraging them to be more active," he said.
Meanwhile, Prof Margaret Battin, professor of philosophy at the University of Utah, told the conference that suicide among the elderly has not been treated as an important political issue. "Many accounts describe it as a neglected issue. Typically less research has been done, fewer researchers are working in that area . . . it has been underexplored in every area," she said.
"Many of the initiatives have been initiatives to reduce the incidence of youth suicide for example," she added.
However, she said typically the rates of suicide are higher in older people around the world.