EDITORIAL: Silent Struggle

THE numbers should make ­every policymaker’s blood run cold: almost one in five Filipinos aged 15-24 has at some point contemplated ending life, and 7.5 percent—roughly 1.5 million young people—have tried.

Those are the stark findings of the 2021 Young Adult Fertility and Sexuality Study (YAFS 5) released by the University of the Philippines Population Institute.

Within just eight years, the share of the youth who feel persistent loneliness, sadness, or social rejection has nearly doubled; suicidal ideation and attempts have more than doubled.

If these statistics charted dengue cases or inflation, emergency funds would already be on the table. Yet mental ill-health still struggles for the same sense of urgency.

Nearly 60 percent of young people who think about suicide tell no one. Only four in a hundred who attempt it seek professional help.

A mere tenth is even aware that suicide-prevention services exist. We are leaving a generation to battle their darkest moments essentially alone.

The pandemic worsened everything, but COVID-19 is not the sole culprit. Understaffed public hospitals, consultation fees beyond the reach of minimum-wage families, and deep-seated stigma have long deterred Filipinos from seeking help.

Five years after Congress passed the Mental Health Act, local implementation remains patchy; only a handful of LGUs have fully staffed community mental-health units.

In many schools the guidance counselor doubles as registrar or PE teacher, and private psychiatric care still costs more than a week’s wage for most households.

A problem of this scale requires the same playbook we use against infectious disease outbreaks—data-driven interventions, financing, manpower, and relentless public communication. Three immediate steps stand out:

1. Fund the front lines. The Department of Health needs a realistic budget to hire full-time psychiatrists, psychologists, and psychiatric nurses down to district-hospital level. The plantilla exists on paper; fill it. At the same time, PhilHealth must reimburse outpatient mental-health consultations and therapy, not just inpatient confinement.

2. Bring services to where the youth are. Schools and universities should have on-site mental-health professionals, not just overburdened guidance offices. A simple DepEd order mandating minimum counselor-to-student ratios—and funding them—would save lives. LGUs can supplement this with youth-friendly “tele-health” booths in barangay halls and e-clinics in public libraries.

3. Fight stigma with information. The YAFS 5 data show that peers are the first line of help. Let’s train that line. Peer-support programs, mandatory mental-health modules in the senior-high curriculum, and mass-media campaigns that normalize seeking help will chip away at shame. Every barangay fiesta public-address system that blares dengue warnings can just as easily broadcast 24-hour crisis-line numbers.

Parents need the language to talk about anxiety and depression without resorting to “kulang ka lang sa dasal” retorts. Faith communities must replace judgment with counseling. Employers can offer employee-assistance programs that include dependents; the private sector already underwrites many blood drives—why not subsidize mental-health hotlines?

October 10 is World Mental Health Day. That date should not merely prompt photo ops but serve as a deadline: by then, agencies must submit concrete, costed plans to cut youth suicide attempts in half within five years. Achievable? Yes—countries that invested early in community-based care, universal insurance coverage, and school-based screening have seen precipitous drops in self-harm.

We pride ourselves on being a young, dynamic nation. But a country that allows nearly one fifth of its young people to contemplate ending their lives is a nation squandering its future. The YAFS 5 findings are not a statistical curiosity; they are an alarm bell.

The only moral—and practical—response is to treat youth suicide as the public-health emergency it is, put money and manpower behind solutions, and drag mental health out of the shadows into the heart of national policy. Lives depend on nothing less.