Your doctor can help you prevent suicide

Those regular visit to your doctor can serve a bigger purpose: you don’t just go away with handfuls of drugs; your mental health could be monitored to check for depression and possible suicidal tendency. That’s if your family physician is careful. This year suicide, depression and general mental health got on the agenda for doctors […]

Those regular visit to your doctor can serve a bigger purpose: you don’t just go away with handfuls of drugs; your mental health could be monitored to check for depression and possible suicidal tendency.

That’s if your family physician is careful. This year suicide, depression and general mental health got on the agenda for doctors around the country, becoming the focus of Global Health Day and Physicians Week.

Worldwide, up to 800,000 suicides are recorded each year—that’s every 40 seconds in which one person commits suicide. For every successful suicide, there are 20 attempts.

Around 79 in 100 suicides occur in low- and middle-income countries.

In Nigeria, the prevalence of ideation of suicide [fixing the idea of it] is 3.2%; planning and attempting it is 1%.

But it can be prevented before it gets bad, and your doctor can help.

“By our training and the capacity we have built over the years,” says family physician Dr Frank Odafen.

“When you see a patient, you look at his demeanour, his gait. When someone comes in with his shirt unbuttoned, his hair unkempt. That’s a red flag.”

The general check includes hissing, vacant gaze, taking time to answer, hissing, talking out of point—they are all signs that something is not right.

“These are issues we aggregate and say the way he is headed maybe suicidal gesture,” says Odafen.

“You don’t give paracetamol and say go. You must harmonise the mind and the body for total health. Do counselling, and if you think it is beyond you, scale it up to a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist.”

He presented a paper at the Global Health Day and told a hall full of doctors: “We must have a high level of suspicion. Our patient encounter must be deep. Think suicide in anybody whose demeanour, voice, appearance appears abnormal.”