Guardian - “This is 1990,” says Timo Partonen, a research professor at the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, pointing to a graph on his laptop. “It was the darkest year in the history of Finland regarding suicide mortality.” That year, Finland recorded 1,512 deaths by suicide, according to the THL, in what was then a population of just under 5 million. By contrast, in 2022 Finland had 740 suicides, in a population of 5.6 million – more in line with (though slightly higher than) the EU average. But it has not been a straight-line trajectory. “There are some years that it goes up a bit, then the next year it goes down a bit, then it goes downwards, downwards, downwards, then it stops again,” Partonen says. ... Among the initiatives credited with helping to bring about this change is the national suicide prevention project, which ran between 1986 and 1996, and lowered suicide mortality by 13%. Partonen puts down the success of this programme to improved care for depressive disorder, quicker and earlier detection, and the advent of better treatments. Also introduced were best-practice guidelines on how to treat other psychiatric disorders, including alcohol abuse and personality disorders. While these had a positive impact, Partonen says many sufferers still do not receive any help because they do not seek it or their treatment gets discontinued.
No comments:
Post a Comment