Parliamentary commissions discuss suicide and mental health

On Tuesday, the members of the Parliamentary Committees on Health and Education met via videoconference for an exchange of views on the issue of suicide in Luxembourg. However, the MPs have not yet obtained the evaluation of the Suicide Prevention Plan 2015-2019, which they had requested.

A fact that the opposition deplored, while MP Gilles Baum from the Democratic Party (DP), who is also the author of the interpellation, stated that he empathised with the staff of the Ministry of Health, who were currently very busy due to the Covid-19 crisis. The MPs agreed that the measures set out in the Plan should be maintained and that the Mental Health Plan, provided for in the coalition agreement, should be further fleshed out.

Teachers are already being trained to spot common warning signs in the behaviour of their pupils, and to actually discuss the situation with the Centre for psycho-social treatment and school support (CEPAS), alongside the students, and to improve the situation.

First aid courses for mental health, which would be similar to already existing first aid courses, were also discussed.

Video report in Luxembourgish:

For the Christian Social People's Party (CSV), there is currently not enough information in Luxembourg on the context of suicides, which complicates prevention. The introduction of a "psychiatric autopsy" could help, according to MP Françoise Hetto.

Hetto stated that if someone wanted to do good prevention, they had to know the causes, which was currently not the case. This was because the country lacked this "psychiatric autopsy", Hetto explained. National regulations on data protection were a big problem in this regard. The public prosecutor's office, on the other hand, was ready to follow this path so that the three databases could be crossed, which in turn would open up the possibility of actually questioning the victim's entourage, the family, and all of the people involved.

According to the CSV MPs, the Ministry should give itself the legal means to do so. To date, there has been no increase in suicides in Luxembourg since the beginning of the pandemic. This is what Minister of Health Paulette Lenert recently wrote in response to a parliamentary question. According to  MP Marc Baum from the leftist party ("Déi Lénk"), the validity of this assertion should be verified.

He stated that the 2020 figures should be assessed with some reservation, because very often suicides were passed on to the public prosecutor's office, which then had to investigate. These investigations sometimes took weeks or even months, which meant that it was far too early to say that the pandemic had not had an impact on the suicide rate.

Déi Lénk and the CSV also regretted that the fees of psychotherapy are still not reimbursed and that, at the same time, there are waiting periods of several months for psychiatrists.