House Deputy Speaker and Las Piñas City lone district Rep. Camille Villar (Rep. Villar's office)
Citing the Department of Education's (DepEd) alarming findings on suicide among learners this past school year (SY), Las Piñas City lone district Rep. Camille Villar is seeking the intervention of both the House of Representatives and concerned agencies to respond to this "seeming mental health crisis". “There is a need to conduct an in-depth assessment of and comprehensive study by relevant government agencies—such as the Department of Health (DOH), Department of Education (DepEd) and the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA)—on the present state of mental health of the country’s education sector," Villar, a deputy speaker in the House of Representatives, said in a statement Tuesday, April 18. She said that such study will help "address immediate needs in a bid to establish more mental health units in schools, hospitals, or rural health units, among other measures". For this purpose, the ranking congressman filed House Resolution (HR) No.900 urging the House Committees on Health and on Basic Education, and other appropriate committees to conduct an inquiry, in aid of legislation, on the increasing number of suicides among students and seeming mental health crisis afflicting the education sector. Villar was referring to the over 400 suicides recorded by DepEd during SY 2021to 2022. The DepEd said that out of the country’s 28 million young learners in public schools, a total of 775,962 sought the assistance of guidance counselors during the period. About 8,000 of those cases involved bullying. Two separate surveys conducted by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2015 and 2019 among teenage students had already showed an uptick in suicidal thoughts among learners even before the Covid-19 pandemic. In the 2015 Global School-based Student Health Survey among Filipino children aged 13 to 17 or those typically on Grade 7 to fourth year high school, 11.6 percent of the respondents said they “seriously considered” attempting suicide during the 12 months before the survey, while 16.2 percent attempted suicide one or more times inthat period. In the 2019 study, 23.1 percent of respondents said they have “seriously considered” attempting suicide while a slightly higher percentage of surveyed students—at 24.3 percent—attempted suicide “one or more times” during the 12 months before the survey. The percentage of students who said that they “did not have any close friends” also grew to 5.9 percent in 2019 from 4.3 percent in 2015. A separate research by the University of the Philippines (UP) Population Institute indicated that close to 1.5 million young Filipinos had tried taking their own life in 2021, compared to the 574,000 young people who tried ending their life as per a 2013 study. Aside from investing in mental health services, Villar said there is also an “urgent need to have a proactive effort to promote their mental health and well-being and prevent mental health disorders and improve the overall mental health access and therapist services in schools and communities to address the apparent mental health crisis in the education sector". “The collective health of citizens greatly affects the success of their overall socio-economic development, as well as their access to education and other basic services,” she further said.