ONE IN 10 calls to the Samaritans is now recession-related, Oireachtas members were told yesterday.
Suzanne Costello, national director of Samaritans Ireland, also told the Cross-Party Oireachtas Group on Mental Health she was concerned at a spike in calls to her organisation in the past month. Some 50,000 calls which she described as “an extremely high number” were received, up from an average of 35,000 in other months.
She said 20 per cent of callers were actually suicidal while the other 80 per cent were seeking advice and support.
The recession-related calls, she said, were around difficulties caused by unemployment, financial problems and anxieties about the future as well as the huge strain these were putting on personal relationships.
She said some parents had called because they were concerned about sons who had no jobs and were drinking heavily and did not want to get out of bed. Other callers were suffering at the hands of banks and spoke about the unfairness of it all.
Meanwhile, Orla Barry, director of the Irish Mental Health Coalition, said the increase in suicide rates was shocking. Figures from the Central Statistics Office this week show rates increased by 24 per cent in 2009 – up from 424 in 2008 to 527 last year.
She said Ireland was at a serious disadvantage in this recession because it had neglected the development of mental health services for years.
She said when she spoke to the Irish College of General Practitioners she was informed GPs are now prescribing more antidepressants than are necessary because of a lack of counselling. She said it was very difficult to access counselling on the medical card as there were long waiting lists, and there had also been a reduction in people seeking counselling from the private sector because of affordability issues.
The embargo on recruitment had also resulted in the loss of 700 posts in the mental health sector last year, she said, which would result in services that were regressing. These posts had to be reinstated, she said.
Separately yesterday, Pieta House, a centre for the prevention of suicide and self-harm in Dublin, said it was experiencing an increase in the number of attempted suicides by children. It said this too was a direct result of the recession.
Joan Freeman, chief executive of Pieta House, said children pick up on parents’ anxiety about the recession without the parents even realising it. “While it is important that children understand that family finances can change and that the whole family unit needs to adapt, they also need to know that it is not a hopeless situation and that the parents will cope with whatever comes their way,” she said.
The National Registry of Deliberate Self-Harm annual report 2009 which has just been published by the National Suicide Research Foundation (NSRF) also shows a 5 per cent overall increase in the rate of hospital-treated self-harm between 2008 and 2009. Some 11,966 presentations of deliberate self-harm were made to hospital emergency departments last year.
The major increase in deliberate self-harm over the past three years among Irish men, particularly younger men, is likely to be associated with the recession, the NSRF said.