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One out of every nine students in Ottawa seriously considered suicide in 2017 and more than 1,300 said they tried to end their lives last year.

Of those young people who attempted suicide, 60 per cent said they had wanted to talk to someone for help, but didn’t know where to turn.

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The alarming numbers are in the Status of Mental Health in Ottawa report published Monday by Ottawa Public Health. While Ottawans as a whole report their mental health is good — 91 per cent of those aged 12 or older say they are satisfied with their lives and 75 per cent reported that they’d felt happy nearly every day of the previous month — for some segments of the city, the mood is darker.

That’s especially true for students in grades 7 to 12.

“It’s a troubling and a sad stat,” said Benjamin Leikin, supervisor of the mental health unit at OPH and one of the report’s authors. “It shows the seriousness of suicide and how important it is that we not shy away from conversations about suicide.”