Instructions and recipes that young people and children use to self-harm and take their own lives circulate through social networks, specialists indicate
Paracetamol is sold in any pharmacy, without a prescription, and suicide manuals are circulating on social networks and via instant messaging revealing that eight grams of this painkiller can be lethal to a teenager’s complexion. Two plus two is four. Specialists in destructive behavior among children and young people, such as self-harm and suicide, are alarmed by the increase in cases that reach health centers every day.
“There is an exponential increase in mental disorders related to depression and anxiety with great despair,” warns María José Penzol, a specialist in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, attached to the Psychiatry and Mental Health service of the Gregorio Marañón Hospital, a reference center where they have had to triple hospitalization resources for these cases. “Autolytic behaviors and suicide attempts have also increased exponentially. The most common are drug overdoses and self-harm with cuts.
“In relation to drugs, one of the most prevalent reasons for admission to our unit, the boys not only try it with psychotropic drug intake,” continues Penzol. “Many times they do it with painkillers. We have evidence that they can be bought at pharmacies. They are not allowed to buy alcohol or tobacco but they are allowed to buy painkillers. Before this warning, the president of the Cofares medicine distribution cooperative, Sofía Azcona, assured that in pharmacies they will begin to be “attentive” to “repetitive purchases by minors” and what “they are being used for”, although in the over-the-counter drugs cannot prevent their sale, he said.
In a country like Spain with 314 suicides in 2020 of people under 29 years of age in 2020, the latest figures from the INE, two factors stand out among those that favor behaviors that can end in fatal cases, as discussed in the forum ‘Suicide in adolescents and social networks’, organized by the Cofares Foundation this morning. The first relates to the aftermath of the pandemic lockdown. Isolation has caused “a lot of pain” among adolescents, more so among the vulnerable. The second is the unlimited consumption of content on electronic devices.
“There is an influence and impact of new technologies due to the copy or contagion effect, through social networks,” says Luis Fernando López, technical coordinator ‘Let’s talk about suicide’ at the Madrid College of Psychology. “Vulnerable young people find other users who show them the same disconnection and pain, and the same hopeless view of the world. Then phenomena such as online self-harm and cyber-suicide (sharing ways to kill oneself) occur, with which they try to reduce psychic pain through physical pain. It occurs when they have not been able to handle the frustration by other means. Although it has a control component, when the physical does not reach satisfactory levels, suicidal ideation begins.
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