Every 10 hours a young girl is admitted to hospital after taking an overdose of over-the-counter pain killers, according to statistics from the National Patient Register given to Politiken by the National Board of Health.

“This is a ridiculous development that must stop now,” says Anna Lynge, founder of the Girltalk network, which seeks to help girls with problems.

Campaign
According to the statistics, figures have increased steadily over the past decade and by seven per cent from 2007 to 2008. Five years ago the authorities introduced large warning labels on pill packaging as well as introducing a campaign telling parents to make sure that children are not able to get hold of pills.

Despite these efforts, however, the number of overdosed teenage girls has increased by 40 percent in the past five years.

The Ministry of Health’s answer to the problem is more information – including an autumn campaign to tell parents and grandparents to keep pills locked away in medicine cabinets.

Both Livslinien – which gives advice to people in crisis – and the country’s chemists have been invited to help develop the campaign, but both have declined as a result of the alarming development in numbers.

“Warning labels and the 2004 campaign have simply not worked, so there’s no reason to think that a new information campaign will make any real difference. We are not going to be party to more stop-gap solutions,” says Health Issues Director Lotte Fonnesbæk of the Association of Danish Pharmacies.

Impulsive
Teenage girls feel that problems mount up with their parents, friends and at school, without them being able to solve them. When they take an overdose, it is often without having thought deeply about suicide.

“The girls are impulsive. In half of the cases they thought about it for less than an hour before taking the pills. They take the first thing they can find – and that’s often big packages of Panodil. These should be put on prescription. That would mean that fewer families would have them. It has helped in England,” says Consultant Physician Merete Nordentoft of Bispebjerg Hospital.

Livslinien
Livslinien says that the problem is greater than just pills.

“The focus is only on how to remove the methods, rather than the welfare of young people,” says Livslinien Chairman Morten Thomsen. He suggests setting up a panel of experts to develop proposals for a national plan of action.

Ministerial no
Minister for Health Jakob Axel Nielsen (Cons) rejects the notion of putting large packages of pills on prescription and plans to meet Liivslinien to hear its ideas on how to break the trend.

“A campaign is important in trying to prevent young people from attempting to commit suicide. It’s all about finding the causes – and here parents, school psychologists and general practitioners play an important role,” says Nielsen in an e-mail, but declines to comment on why some groups have decided to reject his campaign.