Nadeem Hanif
DUBAI // More research is needed in understanding suicide along with better treatment and support for those most at risk, a suicide prevention conference was told yesterday.
Dr Adel Karrani, consultant psychiatrist at Rashid Hospital, said UAE suicide rates were low compared with the rest of the world.
“The trend internationally is of the number of suicides increasing,” said Dr Karrani, who chaired the conference. “There are an estimated 800,000 suicides each year around the world and although the number in the UAE is very low we can’t be complacent.”
More research is required, he said.
“We have a unique set of challenges when dealing with this issue in the UAE. It is a sensitive issue in terms of culture, religion and the law and it needs to be handled in a delicate way.
“We also have the added complexity that we have such a multicultural population that any potential awareness campaigns must be individually tailored to these communities. We would have to handle the western community differently from the Asian or the Emirati community.”
Although awareness campaigns have been run in schools and universities the main focus at the moment was to train clinicians to identify at-risk individuals.
“We are trying to do a number of things with these conferences and with the workshops we run. The aim is to train clinicians to learn to recognise the signs of potential self-harm and to be much better at dealing with potential suicide issues,” he said.
“Over the last few years there have been a number of suicide cases that have been highlighted in the media and the general public need to be made aware of these issues; cases like Robin Williams recently where people confuse the public persona with the private individual. They don’t see the issues he was dealing with so as a result don’t understand why he took his own life.
“We want people to understand that everyone goes through challenges in their life but there are people out their who can help you through the most difficult situations. It’s just a case of reaching out.”
Staff in hospital emergency departments are now better trained in the issue, he noted, and individuals who come in with self-inflicted injuries are treated and given support.
Dr Alan Berman, a senior adviser to the American Association of Suicidology, said it was vital that only the facts were reported in suicide cases.
High-profile suicides, particularly of celebrities, sometimes resulted in other vulnerable people taking their own lives in copycat deaths, he said.
nhanif@thenational.ae
