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It Is Widely Believed That Adolescents Who Commit Suicides Are Products Of ...

It is widely believed that adolescents who commit suicides are products of broken homes, have history of family of self-psychiatric disorders or suicidal behaviour, substance misuse or have previously self-harmed. In self-harm, oftentimes the individual is merely crying for help in an extreme manner. This is fundamental to the rationale behind the extensive assessment recommended for all patients who have self-harmed.
Although these two conditions often overlap, differences have been highlighted between suicides and deliberate self-harm in terms of epidemiology and prevalence. While suicide rates increase with age, the majority of deliberate self-harm occur in people under 35 years of age. Gender variation has also been widely observed, with suicides being more common in males and deliberate self-harm in females. Also, differences arise in the psychiatric status of the patients. Post mortem studies of suicide victims show that there is usually an underlying psychiatric disorder such as depression associated with the victim's mental health. This is not always the case with self-harm patients. Although there could be a history of depressive illness, self-harm is frequently an impulsive act, probably enhanced by alcohol or drug consumption (Hawton and James, 2005).
Self-harm is a serious public health problem and young people are particularly affected by it (Mental Health Foundation, 2006). A case of a patient who has self-harmed is a chance for the health services to effectively evaluate and address any relevant underlying problems and is an opportunity to successfully avert potential future suicides.
1.2 Trends and Statistics
The extent of self-harm and suicides among young people has been accurately described as an unknown quantity (Bywaters and Rolfe, 2002). Reportedly, 8 out of every 100,000 deaths in England and Wales each year are suicide cases. There are an estimated 25,000 adolescent self-harm presentations annually in hospitals in England and Wales (Hawton et al, 2000) and government research report that as many as 1 in 17 young people have attempted to harm themselves. Suicide is the second most common cause of death among 15- to 34-year olds. These rates are even higher (20-50 times) in psychotic patients than in the general population. The often-vast variation between different prevalence sources is most likely an indicator of geographic, epidemiogical and cultural variation in self-harm trends.
Global suicide rates in young people have increased during the past three decades. According to the Office of National Statistics (1999), 1.3% of 5-10 year olds have tried to harm, hurt or kill himself/herself. More than four times this proportion (5.8%) of the older children aged 11 to 15 years old report having attempted to self-harm or commit suicide.

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