Middle School Suicides Reach An All-Time High

Elissa Nadworny
npr.com
Originally posted November 4, 2016

There's a perception that children don't kill themselves, but that's just not true. A new report shows that, for the first time, suicide rates for U.S. middle school students have surpassed the rate of death by car crashes.

The suicide rate among youngsters ages 10 to 14 has been steadily rising, and doubled in the U.S. from 2007 to 2014, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2014, 425 young people 10 to 14 years of age died by suicide.

The article and the video are here.

National Suicide Hotline: 1-800-273-8255

Consider a Text for Teen Suicide Prevention and Intervention, Research Suggests

Adolescents Commonly Use Social Media to Reach Out When They are Depressed

Ohio State University
Press Release
June 24, 2013

Teens and young adults are making use of social networking sites and mobile technology to express suicidal thoughts and intentions as well as to reach out for help, two studies suggest.

An analysis of about one month of public posts on MySpace revealed 64 comments in which adolescents expressed a wish to die. Researchers conducted a follow-up survey of young adults and found that text messages were the second-most common way for respondents to seek help when they felt depressed. Talking to a friend or family member ranked first.

These young adults also said they would be least likely to use suicide hotlines or online suicide support groups – the most prevalent strategy among existing suicide-prevention initiatives.

The findings of the two studies suggest that suicide prevention and intervention efforts geared at teens and young adults should employ social networking and other types of technology, researchers say.

“Obviously this is a place where adolescents are expressing their feelings,” said Scottye Cash, associate professor of social work at The Ohio State University and lead author of the studies. “It leads me to believe that we need to think about using social media as an intervention and as a way to connect with people.”

The entire press release is here.

Needed: New approaches to defuse 'suicide contagion' among teens

How should we talk about suicide? Mental health experts have some ideas

By Andre Mayer
CBC News 
Posted: May 23, 2013

Experts on adolescent behaviour say the apparent susceptibility of Canadian teens to the idea of suicide shows the need to change public discussion about this sensitive topic.

Among the suggestions being put forward are finding new ways to refer to the act, to put it in a more appropriate context and training crisis-intervention teams to be more aware of how young people can respond to a suicide in their midst.

A study published May 21 in the Canadian Medical Association Journal reported that teens who knew of schoolmates who took their own lives were more likely to consider it or attempt it themselves — a phenomenon the authors call "suicide contagion."

The entire article is here.

One Fifth Of Suicidal Teens Have Access To Guns At Home

By Joseph Nordqvist
Medical News Today
Originally published May 6, 2013

Around twenty percent of adolescents in the U.S. who are considered "suicidal" have guns in their homes, according to a recent study published at the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) annual meeting in Washington, DC.

In addition, the researchers revealed that 15 percent of those at risk of suicide know how to use the guns and the ammunition and have access to both.

According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, among young people between the ages of 10 and 24, suicide is the second leading cause of death.

Around half of teenage suicides are carried out using a firearm.

Suicide is a serious public health issue worldwide. It is the most prevalent cause of death in female teenagers and the second most common among male teenagers after road traffic accidents. Official estimates reveal that suicide causes close to 164,000 deaths every year.

The researchers carried out the study to create and develop a new tool for doctors to use which can help identify teenagers and young adults who require some form of intervention to prevent them from harming themselves. They asked the youths about their access to firearms as well as ammunition.

The entire story is here.

8th grade student commits suicide in school

WXYZ.com Action News

Originally published March 21, 2013

Southgate Community Schools superintendent Bill Grusecki says an eighth grade student committed suicide Thursday morning at Davidson Middle School.

Police say the boy was found in a restroom before classes began at about 8:15 a.m. Another student discovered the boy and alerted a teacher. Staff members immediately stepped in and called police.

The boy was transported to a hospital where he died.

The student died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Police say he had a .40-caliber handgun. Police are not releasing the boy's name until family has had time to notify all relatives.

Then entire tragic story is here.

Need help? In the U.S., call 1-800-273-8255 for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.

A Spate of Teenage Suicides Alarms Russians

By Glenn Kates
The New York Times
Originally published April 19, 2012

Russia has been hit with a wave of copycat teenage suicides so pronounced that President Dmitri A. Medvedev felt compelled on Thursday to warn news media outlets against making too much of the deaths, for fear of attracting more imitators.

“It is indeed very alarming and serious, but it does not mean that it is a snowball that will become bigger and bigger every year,” Mr. Medvedev said. “This must be treated extremely gently.”

The spike in teenage suicides began in February, when two 14-year-old girls jumped hand in hand from the 16th-floor roof of an apartment building in suburban Moscow. Afterward, a series of apartment jumps attracted national attention.

Over 24 hours starting on April 9, there were at least six deaths. A girl, 16, jumped from an unfinished hospital in Siberia, while five others hanged themselves: a boy, 15, who died in the city of Perm two days after his mother found him hanging; another 15-year-old, who killed himself on his birthday, in Nizhny Novgorod, a city on the Volga River; teenagers in the northern city of Lomonosov and in Samara; and a 16-year-old murder suspect who used his prison bedsheet to kill himself in Krasnoyarsk.

The entire story is here.

Russians alarmed by rash of teenage suicides

By Mansur Mirovalev

Associated Press

Originally published 2/10/12

MOSCOW (AP) — A rash of teenage suicides in Russia has set off alarm bells and experts are urging the government to take immediate action.

Russia has the world's third-highest rate of suicide among teenagers aged 15-to-19, with about 1,500 taking their own lives every year, according to a recent UNICEF report. The rate is higher only in the neighboring former Soviet republics of Belarus and Kazakhstan.

In recent years, there have been 19-to-20 annual suicides per 100,000 teenagers in Russia — three times the world average, Boris Polozhy of the respected Serbsky psychiatric center in Moscow said Friday.

"Until the highest authorities see suicide as a problem, our joint efforts will be unlikely to yield any results," he said.

In the southwestern Siberian region of Tuva, the rate reaches a staggering 120 suicides per 100,000 teenagers, while the nearby region of Buryatiya has an average rage of 77 per 100,000. Both regions are impoverished and have high crime and alcoholism rates.

Two 14-year-old girls in the Moscow suburb of Lobnya killed themselves this week by jumping off the roof of a 14-story building while holding hands. They had skipped classes for two weeks and were terrified of what their parents would do to them once they found out, Russian media quoted their friends as saying.

The entire story is here.

Most Teens Who Self-Harm Are Not Evaluated for Mental Health in ER

By Mary Elizabeth Dallas
MedicineNet.com

Most children and teens who deliberately injure themselves are discharged from emergency rooms without an evaluation of their mental health, a new study shows.

The findings are worrisome since risk for suicide is greatest right after an episode of deliberate self-harm, according to researchers at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.

The researchers also found the majority of these kids do not receive any follow-up care with a mental health professional up to one month after their ER visit.

"Emergency department personnel can play a unique role in suicide prevention by assessing the mental health of patients after deliberate self-harm and providing potentially lifesaving referrals for outpatient mental health care," said lead study author Jeff Bridge, principal investigator at the hospital's Center for Innovation in Pediatric Practice, in a news release. "However, the coordination between emergency services for patients who deliberately harm themselves and linkage with outpatient mental health treatment is often inadequate."

The story can be found here.

The study is from Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, Volume 51, Issue 2, pages 213-222.  Here is the conclusion of the study from the abstract.

"A substantial proportion of young Medicaid beneficiaries who present to EDs with deliberate self-harm are discharged to the community and do not receive emergency mental health assessments or follow-up outpatient mental health care."

Few Suicidal Teens Get the Help They Need

By Mary Elizabeth Dallas
MedicineNet.com

(HealthDay News) -- Although the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that suicide is the third leading cause of death for people aged 15 to 24 years, a new study shows few suicidal teens are getting the mental health treatment they need.

The researchers found only 13% of teenagers with suicidal thoughts visited a mental health professional through their health care network, and only 16% received treatment during the year, even though they were eligible for mental health visits without a referral and with relatively low co-payments.

Even when researchers combined various types of mental health services, such as antidepressants and care received outside their health network, only 26% of teens contemplating suicide received help in the previous year.

"Teen suicide is a very real issue today in the United States. Until now, we've known very little about how much or how little suicidal teens use health care services. We found it particularly striking to observe such low rates of health care service use among most teens in our study," the study's lead author, Carolyn A. McCarty, of Seattle Children's Research Institute and research associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine, said in a Seattle Children's Hospital news release.

In the study, researchers analyzed the use of health care services among 198 teens ranging in age from 13 to 18 years. Half of the teenagers had had suicidal thoughts; the other half did not.

Although identifying teens with suicidal thoughts is critical, the researchers revealed mental health services were underused among all of the teens studied. Although 86% of the teens with suicidal thoughts had seen a health care provider, only 13% had seen a mental health specialist. Moreover, just 7% received antidepressants, the study found.

The entire story can be found here.