MADRID, Spain.- The Cuban province of Sancti Spíritus annually registers around 200 adolescents with suicidal behavior, according to a recent report in the local media. Escambray.
“In recent years the behavior has been quite similar: we are admitting a total of 100-something, 200 patients a year for suicidal behavior,” doctor Conrado Ronaliet Álvarez Borges, a first-degree specialist in Child Psychiatry, told the aforementioned outlet.
Suicidal behaviors —a term that includes suicide attempts and completed suicide— mostly occur in adolescence and in Sancti Spíritus those who have the greatest incidence are boys between 13 and 14 years of age, said the doctor.
This statistic was corroborated by Dr. Roxany Enríquez Lago, a first-degree specialist in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, who explained that “after the age of ten, the child conceptualizes death, therefore, it is at that age that we talk about suicidal behaviour. But, the most frequent age of suicidal behavior in the province ranges between 13 and 14 years and up to 17.
However, there have been cases of children aged ten, 11 and 12, not only with suicidal intent, but also as a threat or with suicidal gestures.
Enríquez Lago also explains that the adolescent goes through a crisis that is named precisely like this: adolescence crisis, where the young person seeks his sexual identity, his social identity and his professional orientation.
“At this stage, their fundamental activity is to belong or want to belong to a group, whether it be from school or from the neighborhood, and it does not matter if the group has negative behaviors. In order to belong, the person begins to carry out behaviors that may not be part of it, such as smoking, drinking alcoholic beverages, being absent from school without apparent justification”, it expands in this regard.
According to specialists, the main causes that lead to suicide in adolescents are family dysfunction, parental permissiveness, boys’ low tolerance for frustration, rejection of their gender identity, social pressure and school, and inappropriate use of social networks.
At the beginning of this month, the regime’s Minister of Public Health, José Ángel Portal Miranda, made it known that suicide is among the ten main causes of death in Cuba.
