Rita Panahi: Youth self-harm, suicidal ideation soars during lockdown

As the lockdown cycle continues, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to rationalise the harm being inflicted on youngsters in the name of public safety.

As the lockdown cycle continues, with 25 million Australians either under lockdown or under the imminent threat of a lockdown, one cannot overstate the devastating impact on young people.

Children have spent 18 months living under enormous stress and instability. Their academic and social development has suffered and they have missed out on time with loved ones and consequential experiences such as school camps, birthday parties and family celebrations. One cannot be flippant about the toll this is taking on the young; they will never have that portion of their childhood back.

The social isolation is having a grim impact for the very young right through to tweens and teenagers.

This week Lifeline recorded the highest daily number of calls in the organisation’s history.

Suicide Prevention Australia chief executive Nieves Murray said recent lockdowns had exacerbated risk factors particularly for young people.

“For parents, grandparents and carers, it’s important to find time for regular check-ins with the young people in your lives, particularly if you notice things don’t seem quite right,” she said.

Children have spent 18 months living under enormous stress and instability

Child psychologist Clare Rowe warned last week that the collateral damage of lockdowns on young people is significant now but the full impact won’t be known for some time.

“There’s been a 30 to 40 per cent spike not only in emergency ward presentations for things like self-harm, suicidal ideation … But a 30 per cent rise in the last three weeks in Sydney to Kids Helpline and Beyond Blue. We won’t know the effects of this for a long, long time.”

In the most extreme cases vulnerable children are being preyed upon with calls to Kids Helpline over family sexual abuse soaring by 70 per cent in Victoria between January and June.

Across the country there has been a 50 per cent increase in calls from children trapped with abusers with the crisis being called a “pandemic within a pandemic’’.

Data released in June by Kids Helpline showed a staggering 184 per cent increase in attempted suicides among Victorian youth during a six-month period between December and May.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to rationalise the harm being inflicted on youngsters in the name of public safety.

ANDREWS’ SHAMEFUL SCAREMONGERING ON HOSPITALS

Here we go again. Victoria enters Lockdown Six just a day after Premier Daniel Andrews boasted on social media about the state achieving a zero Covid day.

We used to say the definition of madness was doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, now we call that lunacy “best practice’’.

On Wednesday the Premier engaged in hubris by firstly tweeting just one word; “zero”.

He followed it up with:
“Today we’ve recorded zero locally acquired cases of coronavirus. Well done Victoria”.

His next tweet was announcing a “seven day lockdown”.

The premier turned up the hysteria and hyperbole during the lockdown announcement on Thursday afternoon claiming that failure to act would see our hospitals overrun by “thousands” of cases that would “compromise” the care of “cancer patients” and “premature babies”.

It is hard to take such scaremongering seriously when one looks at other advanced nations with comparable hospital systems.

Read the column in full here.