Perhaps you did not see it, but the Irish Times carried a shocking headline, yesterday:
One in 10 young adults say they have attempted to take their own life at some point in the past, according to a Department of Health survey.
Overall, 6 per cent of more than 4,200 respondents to the survey report they have attempted to take their own life at some point in the past.
The rate among over-65s is 1 per cent, rising to 9 per cent among those with a chronic condition, 10 per cent among those aged under 35, and 15 per cent in people with fair or bad general health.
One in ten young people attempting to take their own lives is the kind of headline which makes you sit up straight and pay attention. But it should also make us ask a very basic question: Really?
If one in ten young people in Ireland were making a serious, genuine, desperate attempt to end their own lives, then our already high suicide rate would be the world’s highest by an enormous distance. That statement is in no way to take away from the already serious suicide issues we do have but it would mean that in an average secondary school in Ireland of 700 people, more than 70 would attempt suicide before the age of 30. The recorded number of suicides in Ireland across the whole country, in 2021, was just a few hundred.
The figures are clearly, and obviously, wrong. But that did not stop just about every media outlet reporting them yesterday, and sticking any qualifications to be made about the accuracy of the figures down the bottom of the article.
And the figures are not accurate – even their authors do not pretend so.
These figures – the 1 in 10 figure – came, we are told, from a department of health survey conducted by IPSOS MRBI, a reputable polling company. But then, when we get into the meat of the data they present, this caution is provided:
Self-selecting into online survey completion has the potential to create non-response bias, based on demographic factors or internet literacy, which the separate data weighting applied to this module is designed to mitigate. It should be noted, however, that individuals for whom suicide resonates more strongly may have been more likely to take part in this module, meaning that caution is necessary when applying the results of this part of the survey to the overall population.
And so, there we have it: This portion of the data, reported by the Times, is based on a self-selecting opt-in survey. Even with all the qualifications, the headline amounts in practice to fake news – and the Times was not the only offender.
Gript, like many outlets, runs self-selecting polls on our website. They are fun, and people enjoy them, but they are functionally useless at determining what the population thinks: You will vote in an opt-in poll if you feel strongly about it, and you may not bother if you do not.
The subtleties of this kind of thing are not always easy to translate for the general public, but it’s safe to say that figures of this nature should not be taken seriously, whether conducted via an opt in survey on a website, or an opt-in study conducted by even the most reputable of polling companies. And really, it is bad practice for the Department of Health to be publishing such clearly unreliable figures.
What would be worse, of course, would be if policy were to be made off such figures. Because they clearly overstate to a huge degree the scale of mental health issues in Irish young people. Nevertheless, because this is a department of health survey, we can expect it to be cited in almost every appropriate NGO funding application for the next year, and the chances are that we will see taxpayer funding directed to “solve” a problem that does not really exist.
This is, indeed, the entire self-defeating nature of the State/NGO nexus: It creates incentives not to solve problems, but perpetuate them: When jobs are created in “tackling suicidality in young people”, those jobs then become dependent on suicidality in young people remaining a live problem. And that in turn creates incentives to overstate problems and fixate on them.
When was the last time that you heard of a charity or NGO winding up on the basis that it had successfully completed its mission, and the problem it was founded to solve had now been solved? If anyone ever discovers such an event, let me know – it will be a world first.
But the whole thing depends on stories like this: Misleading figures being translated into calls for more funding, into taskforces to address a problem, into a whole industry springing up to solve the problem, and annual reports to highlight how bad the problem is.
We could do the same story about “binge drinking”, but we’ll save that for another day.