Latest update February 6th, 2025 7:27 AM
Tackling depression gets keen attention in Region Three schools
Depression is a condition that can cause an individual to develop feelings of hopelessness and extreme
Senior Guidance and Counselling Officer, Sharon Dyall
sadness even leading to suicidal thoughts. This condition is not limited to adults as more and more youths are becoming overwhelmed by this condition.
School-aged children are certainly not immune from this condition. Moreover, the Ministry of Education, through the public schools’ Guidance and Counselling Units, has been seeking to raise awareness about depression and its link to suicide.
Efforts in this regard, have however since last year been introduced by Ms. Sharon Dyall, Senior Guidance and Counselling Officer attached to the Region Three Education Department.
She has delivered presentations at a number of Region Three schools seeking to highlight, among other things that depression can manifest in the classroom. Her targets have been teachers since she is hopeful that they could detect depression long before it is too late.
And there may be some simple manifestations of depression by pupils/students which Dyall said can include: difficulty following rules, difficulty with group assignments, crying, withdrawal, distractibility and poor concentration, not completing assignments, seeming unmotivated or uninterested, persistent reports of boredom, difficulty learning and retaining new material, test anxiety, extremely sensitive to perceived criticism, and talk of or attempts to run away from school.
But there are tactics to help reduce the potentially fatal outcome of depression. These have been classified as “Classroom Strategies” by Dyall and are in fact a plea for teachers to monitor for impaired concentration, focus and memory of their charges. Added to this, the Senior Guidance and Counselling Officer has asked that teachers “make sure all assignments are correctly recorded; allow additional time for completion of certain assignments; offer discreet assistance for staying on-task and extra set of books for home; break tasks into smaller parts; adjust homework load until pupil(s)/student(s) are stable and help them use realistic and positive statements about their performance.”
The intent of Dyall’s mission is to help tackle the ever prevailing challenge of suicide.
Suicidal behavior, she explained, is any action that could cause a person to die by means of: taking a drug overdose or consuming poisonous substances, self inflicting wounds, hanging or even crashing a vehicle on purpose.
Alluding to statistics sourced from the World Health Organisation (WHO), Dyall disclosed that Guyana records 44.2 suicides per 100,000 persons per year. This, according to her, is in fact double the figure that was recorded 10 years ago.
WHO, she disclosed, has been able to conclude that there are at least 265 suicides per year in a population of about three quarters of a million persons with the majority of deaths generally occurring in Regions Six (Corentyne, East Berbice) and Two (Pomeroon-Supenaam).
The deductions of WHO are based on 2012 statistics but in 2011 there were 237 deaths by suicide which translated to 4.21 per cent of the country’s reported deaths.
However, WHO has noted that evidence suggest that these figures could be higher since not all suicide attempts are reported.
According to Dyall, based on a September 2007 update from the Centres for Disease Control, there was an eight per cent increase in suicide rates for persons between 10-24 year olds from 2003 – 2004. This has been labeled the “largest single year rise in 15 years.”
Dyall has disclosed too that according to the United States Public Health Service in 1999, more teenagers and young adults die from suicide than from cancer, heart disease, AIDS, birth defects, stroke, pneumonia, influenza and chronic lung disease combined. Added to this, she revealed that each year research shows that 520,000 teenagers require medical care after attempting to kill themselves. “In data from students grades nine-12, those who reported attempting suicide were nearly four times more likely to also have reported fighting than those who reported not attempting suicide,” according to the US Public Service Dyall added.
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