Suicide amongst young women is on the rise.
When it
comes to mental health, is gender the
elephant in the
room?
In early 2016, five teenagers from Woodstock,
Ontario
killed themselves in just as many months,
leaving not
only their family but the community as a
whole
bewildered with grief.
“Everyone was sitting on edge. For a while
there, I
think we all just sat there wondering when it
was
going to end,” says Jenilee Ookcay, a
community
health worker.
Across the country, suicide amongst teen
girls and
young women is on the rise, while male
suicide in the
same age group declines, according to data
released
by Statistics Canada on Thursday.
Health experts have long been concerned
with the
prevalence of suicide amongst young men. It
has
been called a “silent epidemic” and for good
reason.
In 2013, men were three times as likely to kill
themselves as women, the latest data shows.
Why are so many men at risk for suicide?
But while men are still much more likely to
kill
themselves in Canada, young women are
starting to
catch up. Over the past decade, the suicide
rate
amongst girls has increased by 38%, while
male
suicide decreased by 34%.
The growth has helped level out the gender-
gap, with
women accounting for 42% of all suicide
deaths under
20 in 2013. In 2003, they accounted for just
over a
quarter.
Click to see content: canada_suicide_019
A similar trend can be observed in the United
States ,
and in 2014, suicide surpassed maternal
mortality as
the leading cause of death in girls ages
15-19 in the
developing world, according to the World
Health
Organisation.
A 2012 report by the Public Health Agency of
Canada
urged researchers to look at why suicide had
declined
in teen boys since the 1980s, but not in girls.
With the
government expected to earmark
considerable funds
for mental health in the next annual budget,
due in
mid-March, health experts are wondering if
Canada
needs to rethink the role of gender in suicide
prevention.
“It definitely warrants some really dedicated
attention
to why there has been such an increase,
particularly
when we are seeing children and youth dying
by
suicide,” says Renee Linklater, director of
Aboriginal
community engagement at the Centre for
Addiction
and Mental Health in Toronto.
Canadian Attawapiskat First Nation suicide
emergency
Secret donor pledges to help with Wapekeka
suicide
Ms Linklater says she’s been concerned
about
growing suicide rates amongst young
indigenous
women for some time, and limited data
suggests they
are more vulnerable than non-indigenous
girls. Data
obtained by the BBC for 2015 shows that
indigenous
women are more likely to kill themselves
than non-
indigenous women.
Women made up more than half of all
indigenous
suicides in 2015, compared with the non-
aboriginal
population where women made up just one
quarter of
all suicides. Between 2006 and 2015, the
number of
female suicides climbed 1.5 times faster in
indigenous women than it did for non-
indigenous
women.
Why have so many of Winnipeg’s aboriginal
girls
and women been killed?
Ms Linklater says we should be paying more
attention to this disparity, and the effects that
gender
and colonialism have on young indigenous
women,
whom she says experience “double
oppression”.
Researchers in Canada and abroad are not
sure why
suicide is rising among young women. Some
have
suggested it could be because women are
using
deadlier methods. Others say it might be
because
coroners are reporting female suicide more.
In Canada, women make three to four times
as many
suicide attempts as men do. Studies indicate
that
there is a strong link between a history of
sexual
abuse and suicide attempts.
Yet gender is rarely discussed when we talk
about
youth suicide, says Ms Oockay, who works in
suicide
prevention in Woodstock.
“When we train our community members, if
the trends
are shifting, we want to know that,” she says.
Arielle Sheftall, a researcher at the Center for
Suicide
Prevention and Research at the Research
Institute at
Nationwide Children’s Hospital in the United
States,
says that more research is needed into the
role that
gender and age play in suicide prevalence.
“Research has shown that the age of puberty
is
getting younger, and the age of onset for
psychiatric
disorders especially depression, is highly
correlated
with the age of puberty,” says Ms Sheftall.
Another culprit might be sexism, research
into suicide
in developing countries suggests. Dr
Suzanne Petroni,
the senior director for gender, population and
development at the International Center for
Research
on Women, believes that lack of opportunity
and rigid
gender roles may be to blame for the high
rate of
young female suicides in developing
countries, like
India.
Cybervictim Rehtaeh Parsons legacy
“Rampant sexism, harmful gender norms,
perceptions
of girls not being valued as anything other
than a wife
and a mother, very likely is contributing to
mental-
health problems and suicide,” she told the
BBC.
These harmful stereotypes, or “visions of
what they
should be, but aren’t”, have only been
amplified by
the spread of social media around the globe,
Dr
Petroni says.
Although Woodstock is far from the
developing world,
this explanation rings true to Ms Ookcay,
who
teaches suicide prevention.
“Our youth live in a world that the pressure
and stress
is way different than it ever has been. I see
high
levels of perfectionism and the need to be on
it all the
time, and be the best at read more
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