Short Take: Why Are Kids Killing Themselves?

The American Academy of Pediatrics has declared a national mental health emergency.

This worsening crisis in child and adolescent mental health is inextricably tied to the stress brought on by COVID-19 and the ongoing struggle for racial justice and represents an acceleration of trends observed prior to 2020. Rates of childhood mental health concerns and suicide rose steadily between 2010 and 2020 and by 2018 suicide was the second leading cause of death for youth ages 10-24.

According to the CDC, suicide rates for children 10-24 years has increased by 57.4% between 2007 and 2018, with 6,807 children committing suicide that year. This is shocking. But why? The AAP offers its explanation, that it’s “inextricably tied” to the pandemic and the “ongoing struggle for racial justice.” And its list of demands reflects this.

That is why the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP) and the Children’s Hospital Association (CHA) are joining together to declare a National State of Emergency in Children’s Mental Health. The challenges facing children and adolescents are so widespread that we call on policymakers at all levels of government and advocates for children and adolescents to join us in this declaration and advocate for the following:

• Increase federal funding dedicated to ensuring all families and children, from infancy through adolescence, can access evidence-based mental health screening, diagnosis, and treatment to appropriately address their mental health needs, with particular emphasis on meeting the needs of under-resourced populations.
• Address regulatory challenges and improve access to technology to assure continued availability of telemedicine to provide mental health care to all populations.
• Increase implementation and sustainable funding of effective models of school-based mental health care, including clinical strategies and models for payment.
• Accelerate adoption of effective and financially sustainable models of integrated mental health care in primary care pediatrics, including clinical strategies and models for payment.
• Strengthen emerging efforts to reduce the risk of suicide in children and adolescents through prevention programs in schools, primary care, and community settings.
• Address the ongoing challenges of the acute care needs of children and adolescents, including shortage of beds and emergency room boarding by expanding access to step-down programs from inpatient units, short-stay stabilization units, and community-based response teams.
• Fully fund comprehensive, community-based systems of care that connect families in need of behavioral health services and supports for their child with evidence-based interventions in their home, community or school.
• Promote and pay for trauma-informed care services that support relational health and family resilience.
• Accelerate strategies to address longstanding workforce challenges in child mental health, including innovative training programs, loan repayment, and intensified efforts to recruit underrepresented populations into mental health professions as well as attention to the impact that the public health crisis has had on the well-being of health professionals.
• Advance policies that ensure compliance with and enforcement of mental health parity laws.

Why any child should consider, no less commit, suicide is beyond my comprehension. But obviously some, many, do, and this is an unacceptable and outrageous state of affairs. Not that anyone should care how I feel, but child suicide breaks my heart.

The explanations proffered by the AAP, however, stink of ideology at the expense of the lives of children. They don’t explain suicides before the pandemic and the post-George Floyd wave of catastrophizing “racial justice.” In 2015, there were 5,515 child suicides, and they had nothing to do with it. How dare pediatricians care more about woke excuses than the lives of children, than their mental health, than their killing themselves? How dare they demand the usual litany of facile fixes rather than figure out why this is happening and find real solutions to this nightmare? How dare they care so little about children.

I don’t know why childhood suicides are happening. I have concerns about the constant pessimism, the pervasive nihilism, that I see from young people on social media. The sky is falling, the world is ending, everything is horrible and everything is getting worse. Every problem is catastrophic and there is no solution cannot be the message we send our children and expect them to be hopeful about their life and future. Is this part of it? I don’t know, but I believe that it surely doesn’t help. Children are entering a world where misery is validated and victimhood applauded. This cannot be healthy for children and other living things.

I don’t know whether including this helps, but it doesn’t hurt.

If you or someone you know may be considering suicide, contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (en español: 1-888-628-9454; deaf and hard of hearing: 1-800-799-4889) or the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741.