The phenomenon of suicide was analyzed by the academic community, but wasn’t included in the state policies. Suicide and suicidal behavior aren’t defined in any of the policy documents. Only the Penal Code criminalizes instigation to suicide. The Moldova legislation has never stipulated suicide prevention powers for the central and local public administration authorities. In the absence of exhaustive regulations, the so-called prevention actions were taken sporadically and lacked continuity. In the absence of policies, there weren’t created services to meet the needs of the population. This led to a rise in the number of deaths by suicide and suicide attempts. These are some of the conclusions of the special commission for formulating and approving a package of legal amendments on suicide prevention that was created at the end of March.
The commission’s chairman, Socialist MP Vladimir Odnostalko has told IPN that the commission had a number of working meetings and questioned representatives of public authorities, law enforcement bodies, academic community, etc. It ascertained the lack of integrated statistics about the cases of suicide and suicide attempts according to common indicators. Currently, there are three sources that are used to collect statistical data – the Ministry of Health, Ministry of the Interior and Ministry of Justice. Owing to the different data collection mechanisms, the possessed information contains inconsistencies.
As a result of the hearings and after analyzing the presented information, the special commission determined that besides the fact that there are no specialists in sociology, there is also no national instruction on the identification, referral and provision of support for persons who are predisposed to commit suicide and to suicide attempts and for families that experienced suicide or suicide attempts.
According to Vladimir Odnostalko, at the start of this year society witnessed a rise in the number of suicide attempts among children and teens, who were influenced through online games of the so-called “death group”. The commission established that the protection institutions intervened promptly and stopped the spread of these games in the online environment. However, given that it is hard to monitor the virtual environment, more rigorous control needs to be instituted by telecommunications services providers.
The MP noted there is a legislative gap and no institution has the right to restrict access to the online environment. Also, the institutions cannot block the websites with another domain than the national one (.md). Therefore, the commission recommended obliging the national news portals to have a national domain, banning the retransmission/broadcasting or indication of data disseminated by electronic publications, news websites, blogs and others as information source so as not to allow creating false news portals and constituting a public register of persons who can work as journalists.
The commission also established that there is defective communication between the Government and the ministries and there is no inter-sector cooperation between ministries and between the subordinated institutions. In the absence of a plan or a strategy for preventing suicide, the prevention actions are sporadic and lack continuity. The national mental health program for 2017-2021 and the plan of action for implementing this were approved only on April 5, 2017. The program contains measures to prevent suicide.
