Faced with a fragmented support system, long waiting times, and persistent stigma, mental health professionals in Luxembourg are proposing an overhaul in how the country approaches suicide prevention for young people.
A roundtable hosted by our colleagues from RTL Radio on Saturday highlighted an urgent need for a more coordinated and structured approach to suicide prevention, particularly for young people.
The discussion, which featured professional and personal perspectives, underscored the challenges families face in navigating support systems. The panellists were Dr Vera Tetikov, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Hôpitaux Robert Schuman, Gilles Gerges, a social pedagogue and head of service at the Péitrusshaus Crisis Intervention Centre, and Vicky Pundel, a teacher who lost her sister to suicide six years ago.
Pundel’s testimony illustrated the profound difficulty of helping a loved one. She explained that her family was aware of her sister’s critical state but felt powerless. “We just didn’t know what to do. We had no one to turn to,” Pundel said. She recalled her sister’s fear of being stigmatised: “She said, ‘I’m afraid that if people find out, I’ll be the weak one, that everyone will exclude me even more.'”
This sentiment echoes a systemic gap identified by the experts. Gilles Gerges argued that while professional help exists, navigating it is extremely difficult. He called for the development of a “crisis manager” role – a dedicated professional who could provide immediate, non-stigmatising support.
“This person would go to the home, accompany those involved, and be a constant point of contact,” Gerges explained, adding, “They would guide the family from A to Z through the whole jungle of social services in Luxembourg.”
Dr Tetikov endorsed this coordinated approach, stating it would make the entire care process more effective. She criticised the current lack of structure, noting that it is common for five different services to be involved with a family “and no one has a clue what the other is doing.” While she praised the number of resources available in Luxembourg, she argued that the help is often unstructured and uncoordinated, which ultimately wastes precious time in a young person’s recovery.
A key obstacle to effective help, the panellists agreed, is the persistent stigma surrounding mental illness. They stressed that open discussion is needed to help those affected be more open about their struggles.
“There is still not enough awareness,” Pundel stated, recalling painful interactions in the wake of her sister’s death. “We’ve had many good experiences, but there were also people who really didn’t understand at all, who made comments like: ‘My child didn’t get to choose whether they wanted to die or not’. You just think: ‘You haven’t understood what kind of illness this is.'”
The discussion also turned to risk factors, with Dr Tetikov highlighting the danger of excessive social media use. She cautioned that too much screen time can lead to a loss of connection to the outside world, causing young people to withdraw from “actually healthy external contacts” like family, friends, and community clubs.
To counter this, Gerges emphasised that prevention must be rooted in understanding. “Prevention means listening,” he stressed. He explained that it involves not talking at young people or imposing adult perceptions, but rather showing understanding and engaging with their reality. “We should just open up that space and stand together and work in a networked way, in their lived experience and reality,” Gerges stated.
The experts also identified a critical gap in care for young adults aged 18 to 25. Gerges called for expanded structures for this demographic, noting they are too old for child and adolescent psychiatry yet are at a life stage where adequate care is crucial and should not be neglected.
This call for better coordination extends to the issue of long waiting times in child and adolescent psychiatry. Dr Tetikov suggested that a more proactive and structured system could help assess individual needs much earlier.
“Not everyone needs a psychiatrist or a psychologist,” she stated, arguing for better triage to direct young people to the appropriate level of support. By doing so, Dr Tetikov believes, “the entire burden and the whole tip of the iceberg, which then manifests as suicidality, could perhaps be caught much earlier.”