Ned Tijdschr Geneeskd 2021[Jul]; 165 (ä): ä PMID34346650show ga
It is highly tragic when a young person commits suicide. Van Vuuren et al. show trends among self-reported suicidal thoughts and suicidal attempts among over 25.000 Amsterdam children, aged 13 and 14, of different educational levels and ethnic backgrounds, between 2010 and 2015. They advise policy makers to base their choice of suicide prevention measures on the information about trends. In this commentary, we state that policy makers should refrain from doing so, because of the unclear relation between highly prevalent self-reported suicidal thoughts and attempts and extremely rare actual suicide, because of negligence of cultural aspects of suicide in handling the evidence and because trends based on data from 2010-2015 are useless when devising policies in the midst of the covid-19 crisis. We advise policy makers to focus on strengthening young people's resilience and on the prevention of mental health problems instead.
Ned+Tijdschr+Geneeskd 2021 ; 165 (ä): ä
