Young People: Suicide

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

Thursday 27th February 2014 Grand Committee

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a co-chair of the bullying APPG and a patron of Red Balloon. I thank the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Eames, for instigating this debate so that we can discuss the root cause of so many avoidable deaths in young people. He was quite right to quote PAPYRUS’s data on the number of attempted suicides by young people: one every 20 minutes. That is three during this short debate.

The 2012 government report Preventing Suicide in England identified nine categories needing customised care, including children, those with untreated depression, LGBT people and ethnic minority groups. Although I am pleased by the emphasis placed on children as a separate category, we do well to remember that children can fall into most of the other groups as well.

A major factor leading to suicide is bullying. It is shocking that 69% of children in the UK report being bullied. The National Centre for Social Research report on bullying showed that each year 16,000 children are out of school long-term with depression because of bullying, and that there are at least 25 confirmed suicides as a result of bullying, but there are probably many more that do not meet the criminal standard that the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Eames, spoke of earlier.

Early intervention is vital. Most children do not suddenly decide to kill themselves. ChildLine says that there has been a,

“trend towards younger and younger children dabbling in self-harm, with a 50% increase among those aged 12 in the last year alone”.

However, even younger children are at risk. Last year nine year-old Aaron Dugmore hanged himself after being targeted by a gang of older bullies at his school simply because he was new. Ayden Keenan-Olson, aged 14, overdosed on prescription pills after homophobic and racist bullying by his classmates. He had reported up to 20 instances of bullying since joining his school but no action was taken. He eventually bypassed security settings on his computer to research suicide.

That raises the issue of online suicide forums and cyberbullying. Later this year, family-friendly content filters will be set automatically for new broadband users. However, most kids are so tech-savvy that they are able to bypass these settings in minutes. There is much more to fear from the “dark web” free of filters than from known, visible sites, so we must educate and support our young people to protect themselves.

The launch of Zipit, ChildLine’s first app for smartphones, is great news. It is packed with humorous tips for teens and advice to help them to cope with flirting and messaging, equipping them to protect themselves from online sexting, bullying and trolling. In the two months since its launch, more than 45,000 young people have signed up.

Frankly, CAMHS are struggling to deliver mental health services or reduce the number of young people killing themselves. Pressure on services can mean many months’ wait for urgent appointments, or having to travel 300 miles to get a bed in a tier 4 clinic. I heard on Monday of a child who had had to go from Birmingham to Glasgow for such a bed. I ask the Minister what is being done to speed up access to CAMHS facilities and to minimise the distances that must be travelled in instances of urgent child referrals. The coalition Government are rightly demanding parity of esteem for mental health services, but we have yet to see it happen.

I want to end on a more positive note, although it may not seem that way at the start. First Capital Connect asked to work with Red Balloon, a specialist bullying charity, after three bullied children threw themselves in front of trains. One was a 14 year-old ballerina and the second two were a young Goth couple who jumped together in front of a train. Red Balloon works with suicidal bullied children, offering intensive recovery and education support so that children can return to mainstream school and to their friends and society. However, only a handful of places are available nationally, and CAMHS beds are also limited, not to mention the constant problems around funding. My worry is this: does that reflect the value we place on these tragically short lives? Much more is needed to get early support to youngsters before depressive thoughts of death turn into the horror of young suicide, which affects family and friends for ever.