Psychiatrists, NGOs, and health workers have not stopped raising awareness of an increase in the suicide rate in Spain, including the Canary Islands, but new data released yesterday by the INE (National Institute of Statistics) has confirmed their fears.
Since the start of the pandemic, Spain has registered record numbers of suicides, which are worsening year on year, and is getting even more serious among young adults, which has the highest proportional growth in victims.
This upward trend began in the second half of the last decade, but which has clearly accelerated with the worsening of mental health and coexistence problems, derived from the impact on citizens of the pandemic, confinement, fear, deaths, and the harshness of the health, economic and social crisis that we have all been through.
Last year 4,097 people in Spain took their own life, which is more than eleven every day, 94 more victims than in 2021, and an increase of 2.3% even though previous records had already been pulverized two years ago. In the last twelve months, there have been 558 more deaths than in 2018, which represents an increase in suicides of 15.8% in just four years.
But the most terrible data are those that reveal the scandalous number of suicides among young people. Emergency doctors, psychologists, and paediatricians first alerted us to this almost two years ago. After the end of confinement, the epidemic waves and the restrictions, the suicide attempts, and the number of teenagers self-harming that they saw multiplied.
The Anar Foundation, the main private manager of telephone helplines for children, elaborated on the problem with new terrifying figures. Children and teenagers who claimed they were planning to commit suicide doubled since the start of the pandemic and those who go a step further and attempt it have tripled.
201 people under the age of 25 took their lives in Spain in 2021, which is 40% more than a year earlier, and the nightmare continued last year when 212 minors committed suicide, eleven more than a year earlier, with a 5.5% increase. This last percentage shows that the growth of suicides among the youngest age group is twice as fast as among the general population.
But the most disturbing statistic is the tremendous growth of suicide among adolescents. It has gone from 53 deaths between the ages of 15 and 19 in 2021 to 72 last year, an increase of 36% in just one year.
There are only two positive data in this age group. The first is that suicides among young people between 20 and 24 years old (128) despite continuing in very high figures, have stabilized. There were only two more than in 2021. The second good news is the very strong decrease in child suicides. Last year there were twelve deaths between the ages of 10 and 14 in Spain, ten less than a year earlier, representing a drop of 45%.
Suicide is the main cause of external death (unrelated to a disease) in Spain since it surpassed traffic accidents for the first time in 2008, but it has never reached these extremes before. Currently, it now accounts for almost four times more annual deaths than road accidents.
