SUICIDE AMONG STUDENTS

SUICIDE AMONG STUDENTS: 4.

Assoc. Prof. Paulin Tay Straughan asked the Minister for Education (a) whether his Ministry tracks documented cases of clinical depression and attempted suicide among school-going students and, if so, what are the possible triggers, and what is being done to alleviate the incidence; and (b) how does his Ministry manage these cases in general and, in particular, whether the receiving school is informed when a student moves from primary school to secondary school.

The Senior Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Education (Mr Masagos Zulkifli B M M) (for the Minister for Education): Mr Speaker, Sir, MOE pays careful attention to the mental well-being of our students and closely monitors the state of mental health in our students, including depression. Clinical depression can affect people across social spectrum and age groups but it is far less common among children and adolescents.

Suicidal acts are symptoms of a complex problem for which there is no one single cause. The main contributory factors among student suicides are relationship problems with family and peers, failure to meet self and parental expectations, dysfunctional family patterns, as well as the occurrence of mental illness, including clinical depression.

MOE actively works with the Health Promotion Board (HPB) and mental health professionals, including psychiatrists and clinical psychologists from the Child Guidance Clinic (CGC) of the Institute of Mental Health (IMH), to implement a comprehensive approach to build resilience against stress and prevent suicides. Our approach comprises three key elements: (i) building protective factors in our students, (ii) identifying at-risk students for early support, and (iii) channelling students with depressive disorders and/or suicidal tendencies to the appropriate

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psychological, medical and other necessary resources for intervention.

Our schools help students build protective factors through the provision of social and emotional learning (SEL). SEL helps students acquire a set of social and emotional competencies which will enable them to better understand themselves, interact effectively with others and cope with life’s challenges, thereby inoculating them against depressive and suicidal thoughts and behaviours. This is further augmented by the Mind Your Mind (MYM) programme, a school-based mental health education package, targeted at primary and secondary school students. The package, jointly developed by HPB and MOE, covers topics such as stress and anger management, building positive self-esteem and depression.

To help students in need of support, every school has a tiered-referral system to facilitate the early identification and extension of help to them. At the first tier are our teachers who are trained to identify students who show signs that they are troubled and provide the necessary basic support, including referring students to the second tier of support formed by the school counsellors.

Complex cases are referred to the third tier of support, which can involve guidance specialists from MOE, mental health professionals at the CGC, or the relevant social service agencies. Pertinent information about students, including support rendered to them by counsellors, is handed over from the primary to secondary school, as they move from school to school.

While schools can support and educate our youths, the support from the home is also paramount. Parents and family members can help their youths set realistic expectations for themselves and develop the resilience and strength of

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character which will enable them to ride the challenges of life.

Assoc. Prof. Paulin Tay Straughan (Nominated Member): Sir, I have three supplementary questions. The first relates to the role of teachers. They are inevitably the frontline identifiers. Can the Senior Parliamentary Secretary elaborate on how well teachers are trained in the role of counsellor/mentor, because that is not an easy task and is not an innate kind of ability either?

My second question relates to the balance between student privacy and through-train information, so that when they move from institution to institution, there is sufficient information on their at-risk behaviour so that the next institution will not be caught off guard. What is in place for that?

Third, I wonder if the Ministry would consider reducing class size in secondary schools, because it seems that that is where the impact of all kinds of challenges come on the teenagers, when they are searching boundaries. Perhaps a better staff-student ratio may help students morph into their new identities as young adults, and for teachers and other educators/mentors to be able to better identify students with such a need.

Mr Masagos Zulkifli B M M: Sir, as I mentioned, the approach to addressing the issues is three-fold. One of them is to build the ability of teachers to spot them. We have been working with the Health Promotion Board's psychologists. There is a committee right now or an effort called Reach where teachers are being trained by full-time school counsellors to learn to spot the symptoms of depression or even to look at behaviours that may lead to depressions. Right now, this is piloted in the north zone schools. We hope to finish this by the end of this year, and then roll it out to the rest of the schools, so that

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every teacher has some level of skill or competency to spot such problems.

Second, on the question of information, this passing of information on students has just started this year when we started to populate the information in the School Cockpit for counsellors to know about the students who have been counselled from their previous school. We assure Members of the House that we make sure the privacy of the students is taken care of. The information is confidential and only the relevant officers, who are usually the full-time school counsellors (FTSCs), will have access to this information.

Third, class size for secondary classes is always an issue that will be reviewed over time. At this point of time, what we have done instead is to increase the number of support that students get. For example, we have already increased the number of allied educators that support teachers in the classes. We have provided more FTSCs in schools where we find there is a need for them, and also operations managers to take away some of the administrative matters that teachers would otherwise have to do.

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