Suicide Screening and Profit Motivation…
Wintersteen MB (2010). Standardized Screening for Suicidal Adolescents in Primary Care. Pediatrics PMID: 20385627
There is a faerie story floating around out there, that suicidal ideation is a medical condition that is fixable by medical interventions. Predominantly, that translates into lots of meds, pumped into the kiddies long before they ever have a suicidal thought. The wolf within the sheep’s clothing of the suicide prevention industry is in fact to get as many kiddies as possible onto meds. The profit potential for big pharma here is exponentially fantastic. We become so blasé about reading reports like this one (see links above, and below), urging us to ‘screen or die’, that we throw away our critical thinking caps and zombie-like, get on board the dumb-arse gravy train. Even though screening for suicidal ideation has no positive impact on the suicide rate, and may actually exacerbate it, one must never question why we engage in such counter-productive endeavours.
For every person in Australia who kills himself or herself each year, tens of thousands do not. So is it worth routinely screening every young person, in primary care settings, for suicidal ideation? Focussing on a tiny subset of the overall young person population would already significantly diminish the likelihood of finding that ‘one person’ amidst the tens of thousands. Finding that ‘one person’ would depend on whether she or he, in the moment, fesses up to being suicidal. It would also depend on the efficacy of the intervention offered. Meds cannot cure and seldom effectively treat suicidal ideation. Suicidal ideation is created by the problems that afflict us in the real world, how we approach resolving those problems (if at all), and indeed, the actual solvability of those problems. Finally, it is possible that the one young person who does kill her or himself, had been screened and cleared as ‘okay’.
Standardized Screening May Help Identify Suicidal Adolescents 2010
Update: Further proof that screening can be an attractive proposition for backyard landscaping but a real dog’s breakfast when it comes to stopping Johnny or Jose from jumping off the twig (see link, below). The attached article contains within, at pp.436-437, the following lines…
‘…methods of assessing suicide risk have only modest sensitivity and specificity, and…suicide is rare. The limited capacity to predict who will commit suicide is evident from the statistic that more than 2% of the Australian population experience suicidal ideas in any given year, but fewer than one in 10,000 complete suicide’.
Blah! Blah! Blah!