News — Since the 1990s, the suicide rate among young Quebecers has plummeted. It fell by 60 per cent among 15-to-19 year-olds between 1995 and 2019, compared with a 20-per-cent decrease among 20-to-34 year-olds between 2005 and 2019.
How to explain the decline?
While there are multiple factors at play, Alain Lesage, a professor in UdeM’s Department of Psychiatry and Addiction, and Camille Brousseau-Paradis, a psychiatry resident and master’s student in psychiatry and addiction at UdeM, have identified five key reasons.
They them in the Fall 2024 issue of the French-language journal Santé mentale au Québec:
1. Awareness-raising in schools
Mental-health education has long been a cornerstone of suicide prevention.
A major impetus came in 1997, when five teenagers at a high school in Coaticook, a town south of Sherbrooke in the Eastern Townships, committed suicide within a few months of each other.
A coroner’s inquest found the teens had been experiencing depressive symptoms but had shared their suicidal thoughts only with friends, never discussing it with adults or professionals.
The tragic deaths led to the creation of Partners for Life, a free program offered since 2000 to young people between 14 and 18. To date, nearly 1.2 million Quebec students have taken the program.
“Partners for Life explains what depression, mental health and suicidal ideation are, and what to do if you or someone you know is in distress,” Brousseau-Paradis said.
2. Primary care and ADHD treatment
Family doctors and pediatricians also play a key role in screening for mental-health disorders, especially deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which is associated with high-risk behaviours, including suicidal ideation.
“ADHD is one of the psychiatric conditions for which pharmacological treatment is most effective,” Brousseau-Paradis noted, adding that increased use of psychostimulants has probably contributed to the decline in the suicide rate.
In 2019-2020, 7.7 per cent of Quebecers under 25 had received at least one prescription for ADHD medication.
3. Counselling
Since 2010, Quebec’s Ministère de la Santé et des Services sociaux (MSSS) and the Association québécoise de prévention du suicide (AQPS) have trained nearly 30,000 counsellors to identify and support people at risk of suicide through the Intervenir auprès de la personne suicidaire à l’aide de bonnes pratiques program.
Brousseau-Paradis stressed the importance of this training for staff at CLSCs, community organizations and schools, who play a vital role in helping young people in distress.
A shorter, seven-hour 'Sentinel' training program has also been created to equip adults who are in contact with at-risk youth in a non-professional capacity to spot signs of distress and refer the young people to the appropriate resources.
4. Coordinated services for at-risk groups
Young people living in youth centres are a particularly vulnerable population.
“During the aughts, it was discovered that a third of youth suicides involved those living in youth centres,” Brousseau-Paradis said. As a result, protocols were established to improve collaboration between counselling and psychiatric services and provide better care for these at-risk youth.
5. Early prevention
Lastly, Quebec’s public network of early childhood centres (known by their French acronym CPE) have had an indirect but significant impact on the mental health of children from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Studies have shown that these daycare centres can mitigate the negative effects of an unstable family environment and help build long-term resilience.
“Children of depressed mothers who attended a CPE were less affected than those who stayed at home,” Brousseau-Paradis explained.
“The daycare centres provide a protective environment and lay a solid foundation for the psychological development of young children, which is why it’s so important to maintain and support them.”
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