I.A study by the Essen University Hospital revealed a sharp increase in suicide attempts by children and adolescents at the end of the lockdown in spring 2021. In a register created for this purpose, 27 German children’s intensive care units reported a total of 93 suicide attempts for the period from mid-March to the end of May 2021. That was significantly more than in the same periods in 2017 (25 suicide attempts), 2018 (35), 2019 (37) and 2020 (22). If you extrapolate the number from 2021 to all children’s intensive care units in Germany, according to the previously unpublished study, you get around 450 to 500 suicide attempts by children and adolescents across Germany.
Christian Dohna-Schwake is a senior physician and intensive care physician at the University Hospital Essen, he worked on the study. During the first lockdown in spring 2020, his team contacted colleagues from other clinics because two children in Essen were in the intensive care unit after falling out of the window. “We asked ourselves whether the lockdown would lead to more injuries in the home environment,” says Dohna-Schwake. After 37 pediatric intensive care units from all over Germany had entered data on the patients admitted in the first lockdown in a register, the two falling windows turned out to be coincidences. “Overall, there were a few more leisure accidents, that could have been due to the good weather, but that’s pure speculation,” says Dohna-Schwake. The project was ended for now.
Help with thoughts of suicide
If you are thinking of killing yourself, try talking about it to other people. There are a number of offers of help where you can talk to other people about your thoughts – also anonymously.
This can be done by phone, chat, email or in person.
The telephone counseling is anonymous, free and available around the clock. The phone numbers are 0 800/111 0 111 and 0 800/111 0 222.
The call to the telephone counseling service is not only free of charge, it does not appear on the telephone bill, nor in the itemized record.
The offer of one also comes from the telephone counseling Help chats. Registration takes place on the Telephone counseling website. You can also enter the chat room without an appointment. If no consultant is available, it will always work with a booked appointment.
The third offer of telephone counseling is the possibility of Email advice. You can log on to the telephone counseling site and write your messages and read the counselors’ replies. In this way, the e-mail traffic does not appear in your normal mailboxes.
At the end of the second lockdown, which began gradually in autumn 2020, the doctors in Essen suddenly observed more suicide attempts by adolescents. The project was repeated. “This time we worked with 27 children’s intensive care units and created a study from this,” says Dohna-Schwake. “It turned out that the number of suicide attempts had really increased significantly.” The doctor assumes that many factors have contributed to this increase: “Firstly, the reduction in social contacts, which not only resulted in school closings, but also that have resulted in a temporary ban on club sports. ”Many young people also lacked a perspective. The second lockdown dragged on for a long time without knowing when it would end. “Then there was the fear for family members and the increase in the use of social media,” says Dohna-Schwake. Overall, it is undisputed that anxiety disorders, depressive symptoms and eating disorders have increased in adolescents in the pandemic. And the increase in depressive disorders in children means that more children want to send out a cry for help in their desperation, says Dohna-Schwake. Fortunately, the vast majority of suicide attempts were unsuccessful, but many led to poisoning with tablets.
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Dohna-Schwake thinks that schools are not closed at the moment despite the very high corona incidence. “In the summer I was still skeptical as to whether the politicians would really keep their promises. But they kept their word, that’s a very important factor. ”He doesn’t want to call the long school closings during previous lockdowns a mistake. “Unlike lateral thinkers, politicians have to make decisions without being able to know 100 percent what is right at the moment,” he says. “But you have to collect data afterwards and, in this case, determine that it was a very difficult, dramatic situation for children and young people at the time.” Decisions now have to be made on this basis.