It’s one of those studies that grabs the headlines (without answering all the resulting questions): one in four pupils in Portuguese secondary schools shows signs of depression – girls particularly.
The report compiled by Coimbra’s school of nursing classifies depressive symptoms as ranging from ‘light to moderate to serious’.
The message is that 26% of adolescents “have depressive symptomology”, and 600 of these (40% of the 6,100 questioned) are at the high end of risk of self-harming.
The study evolved from nine years of the +Contigo programme which has been running in the centre and south of the country and is soon to be rolled out into northern areas.
Coordinator José Carlos Santos concludes “there has been a slight levelling off” in terms of depressive states, but “from a mental health point of view we cannot say that results are any better” than they were in the last round-up (compiled a year ago).
What can be said is that in schools where the programme is being run, there have been no suicides.
Youngsters involved have “improved their well-being and self-confidence and coping (the cognitive process to deal with situations of stress) – but events in schools in Ireland have overshadowed this year, he explained.
In Ireland there has been “a drastic increase of adolescent suicides between the ages of 15 to 19” and the case histories show very similar pathologies to situations in Portugal: youngsters who start by self-harming and have no support from authorities.
Said Santos, this is why +Contigo is so important and should widen its scope.
