By LACHLAN MOORHEAD
THE trial of a new suicide prevention training program will soon be rolled out across four high schools in Casey, Cardinia and Dandenong.
The trial, funded by the Federal Department of Social Services, will see Year 8 to 11 students involved in four 45-minute lessons on life skills, suicide prevention and awareness.
The pilot program – which will work with 8500 students, parents and teachers across the four school communities – comes after a State Coroner last month released her findings into the “cluster” of youth suicides in Casey and Cardinia in 2011 and 2012 at an official Department of Human Services briefing.
The Coroners Prevention Unit (CPU) completed a retrospective case series examination of suspected suicides and hospitalisation for self-harm among residents of the City of Casey and Cardinia Shire, aged 24 and under, for the period 2007 to 2013.
For suspected suicide, the CPU found that compared to previous years the frequency rate per 100,000 population was elevated in 2011 – meeting the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention’s definition of a “suicide cluster”.
ALP candidate and local high school teacher Simon Curtis said he supported the school prevention trial but was interested in learning more specific details as to how it would run.
“As far as this being an area that needs attention, there is no local issue more important than this,” he said.
“We can talk about figures and where this region sits statistically, but until the number becomes zero, this will be an extremely important issue for this community, and we’re a very long way away from it becoming zero.”
Specifically in the Coroner’s findings, six suspected suicides were identified among “usual residents” of the City of Casey in 2011, compared to one in 2010 and three in 2009.
Similarly four suspected suicides were identified among “usual residents” of Cardinia Shire in 2011 compared to one in 2010, two in 2009, and zero in both 2008 and 2007.
And in the two years after 2011, while the frequency of suspected suicides was found to have reduced slightly, it remained higher than 2009 and 2010 in both the City of Casey and the Cardinia Shire – with four suspected suicides in 2012 and 2013 for Casey, and three in both 2012 and 2013 for Cardinia.
Coroner Audrey Jamieson recommended the Municipal Association of Victoria (MAV), through consultation with Casey Council, develop a suicide prevention and post-vention response framework, which “has the ability to take into account various socio-demographic and geographic profiles of individual local government areas”.
Those in need of immediate assistance can phone Lifeline on 13 11 14.
