According to the National Poison Information Center (NVIC), there has been a significant increase in the past two years in the number of reports of young people between the ages of 13 and 17 who deliberately overdosed on painkillers.
Paracetamol and ibuprofen are often mentioned as drugs that can be harmful to health in case of overdose.
Painkiller overdose
For years, the number of reports fluctuated between 1000 and 1150. In 2021 this number increased to 1512, last year there were 1439 reports. The increase is particularly strong among girls between the ages of 13 and 15. The NVIC is concerned about these high figures and wants to conduct more research.
The NVIC already established in 2021 that approximately 84 percent of the reports concerned girls. It was also noticeable that reports are received more often during weekdays and school periods compared to weekends and summer months.
Hundreds of tablets
In 2022, the NVIC will ask a few additional questions for every report of an overdose in young people, the data of which have yet to be analysed. During the corona pandemic, factors such as school closures, the curfew and the one and a half meter society were mentioned as risks for the mental health of young people.
In an interview with the NOS Radio 1 Journaal, professor Dylan de Lange, the head of the NVIC, stated that teenagers take the tablets in large quantities at the same time. Some teens take as many as 50 or 100 tablets at a time, which he says indicates deliberate behavior. “Nobody takes a hundred tablets in response to a headache, that’s very strange.”
Impulsive
De Lange suspects that the pills are taken impulsively, as they are often present in the house. This indicates that the teens are reaching for whatever is within their reach at the time, without it being a carefully thought-out plan.
Although an overdose does not always mean that the child wants to commit suicide, it is a sign that something is wrong, according to a child psychiatrist involved in research into the mental health of young people.
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More and more young people take painkillers overdose: ‘They grab what they have within reach’
2023-07-07 10:52:30
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