Meeting of the Parliament 12 September 2018
As members have heard, 680 Scots lost their lives by suicide last year. That total was lower than in previous years, but Samaritans has told us that last year, for the third year running, deaths by suicides in Scotland increased for young men aged between 15 and 24. As we have heard, the suicide rate for men in Scotland was more than three times the rate for women, with 77 per cent of suicides being men.
The action plan says that suicide rates have fallen for children and young people, but also that self-reporting on mental wellbeing among young girls in Scotland has worsened.
I have asked friends, colleagues and family what they believe to be the single biggest killer of men under 50 in the UK. They have said that it is heart disease or lung cancer, or they have asked whether it is dementia. All have been surprised to learn that the answer is, in fact, suicide.
The answer is all the more shocking when we consider that suicide is preventable; it is not inevitable. I know that the Parliament agrees that one suicide is too many, but a Samaritans poll that was conducted earlier this year showed that 61 per cent of people in Scotland have been affected by suicide. Twenty-nine per cent have experienced the suicide of a friend or family member or have supported someone who was dealing with suicidal thoughts.
We would seek to intervene if a friend or colleague was in poor physical health, and we need to know how to help someone who is dealing with suicidal thoughts.
The debate will—rightly—focus further on the need for support to be available for our young people as and where they need it. SAMH has pointed out that that is about not only teaching staff but all school staff. Its recent survey found that two thirds of teachers had not received sufficient mental health training and that the majority of non-teaching staff had received no such training.
The action plan’s recognition that CAMHS need to be reformed is welcome and overdue. The Scottish Youth Parliament, the children and young people’s mental health task force and the youth commission on mental health will all be involved. In this year of young people, work is going on with the see me campaign, and the cross-party group on children and young people has recently done work on mental health. That has a role to play in ensuring that we get this right for every child. When Fulton MacGregor was chairing the cross-party group, it issued a report that is well worth reading. It pointed out that,
“Under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child ... children and young people have a right to good health. However, this report highlights that we are failing to uphold this right and shows the scale of the problem we face in relation to children and young people’s mental health. With three children in every class experiencing a diagnosable mental health problem by the age of 16, we must do better.”
I welcome the recognition of that. The programme for government proposed the incorporation of the principles of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which is essential.
Like others, I thank SAMH, Samaritans and Stonewall for their briefings. All those organisations welcome the plan, but they all have questions about it, too. SAMH asks:
“Can the Government confirm that the new Scottish mental health and suicide prevention training program includes provision of skills to actively intervene where someone is experiencing thoughts of suicide?”
It also asks whether the Government intends to retain applied suicide intervention skills training, on which I would welcome the minister’s comments.