What is wrong with our teens?
The incidents of suicidal thoughts among young people is on the rise.
The Netflix series “13 Reasons Why” has raised concerns about how the story depicts suicide and the aftermath among teens.The incidents of suicidal thoughts among young people is on the rise.
The number of young children and adolescents admitted to children’s hospitals for thoughts of suicide or self-harm more than doubled during the last decade
A major new study at the 2017 Pediatric Academic Societies Meeting in San Francisco, crunched administrative data from 32 children’s hospitals across the U.S. and identified all emergency room and inpatient encounters between 2008 and 2015, for children between 5 and 17 years old who reported thoughts of suicide or serious self-harm.
The study found 118,363 such encounters at the children’s hospitals during that period. The annual rate of all encounters identified as “suicidality or self-harm” increased from 0.67% in 2008 to 1.79% in 2015. Just over half the patients with suicidal thoughts or actions (59,631 children in total) were 15- to 17-year-olds, 37% (43,682 children) were with 12- to 14-year-olds, and almost 13% (15,050 children) involved 5- to 11-year-olds. There were seasonal variations, with the lowest percentage of cases occurring during June through August and the highest during spring and fall, it added.
“Suicide is the third leading cause of death among adolescents, and gay teens are four times more likely than straight teens to attempt suicide.”
Younger children who died by suicide more often experienced relationship problems with family members and friends and less often had boyfriend/girlfriend problems or left a suicide note, a separate study released last year found.
Among those with mental-health problems, childhood suicides more often involved attention-deficit disorder and depression in older children, according to that study, published in the journal Pediatrics. It analyzed national data covering the suicides of children aged 5 to 11 from 2003 to 2012 in 17 U.S. states.
