Suicidal Thoughts Or Suicidal Attempts Doubled In Children and Teens
(CNN)The number of children and teens in the United States who visited emergency rooms for suicidal thoughts and suicide
attempts doubled between 2007 and 2015, according to a new analysis.
Researchers used publicly available data from the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey, administered by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention every year. From the 300 emergency rooms sampled, the researchers tracked the
number of children between 5 and 18 who received a diagnosis of suicidal ideation or suicide attempts each year.
Diagnoses of either condition increased from 580,000 in 2007 to 1.12 million in 2015, according to the study, published
Monday in JAMA Pediatrics. The average age of a child at the time of evaluation was 13, and 43% of the visits were in
children between 5 and 11.”The numbers are very alarming,” said Dr. Brett Burstein, the lead study author and a pediatric
emergency room physician at Montreal Children’s Hospital of McGill University Health Centre. “It also represents a larger
percentage of all pediatric emergency department visits. Where suicidal behavior among the pediatric population was just 2% of all visits, that’s now up to 3.5%.”
https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/08/health/child-teen-suicide-er-study/index.html
Why Is This Not Getting More Attention ?
Why is this not getting more national attention? Suicidal thoughts in children are unusual. These numbers have doubled in a span of eight years. What has changed? What is the biggest social change that has happened in that span of time?
Personally, I can remember around 2009 and 2010 thinking it was strange that we had to talk about getting our elementary school and middle school children a cell phone. It became a must purchase. Honestly, I was forced to give in because of societal pressure. The thought of my kid being the only one in the 7th grade class without a cell phone was too horrible to bear. That is how it all started. Because the older kids got their phones the younger one has to get hers too. Of course. There is no way the youngest could be left out. And just like that. Everyone had a phone. Everyone.
This was a grand social experiment that wasn’t planned or wasn’t controlled. It just happened. Of course the phone companies and the cellular communications companies were ecstatic. They’ve made billions of dollars. So have all the social media giants. The Facebooks and the Instagrams and all the people who benefit personally from having huge numbers of followers. Everyone knows who they are.
But what about our kids? Why are children between the age and 5 and 11 even thinking about suicide? Suicidal thoughts should be the furthest thing from their minds. Doesn’t that seem strange to you? It does to me.
Is Social Media Playing a Role ?
Social media and time on social media is one huge social experiment. No one knows the long term consequences of these major changes. Personally, I can already see the changes in my own family that is reflected in our interactions.
When a child or teenager starts thinking that suicide is an answer to a problem, that is a huge problem. Many people will just chalk it up to mental illness. The data doesn’t support that. There is no way that the incidence of depression or anxiety is going to double in the span of eight years. Something else is going on.
I believe this is a crisis. But there isn’t a lot of news coverage about this problem. I also believe there is a solution that will be of benefit to each of us and to our families. But clearly social media is having an impact:
“Social media has been linked to higher levels of loneliness, envy, anxiety, depression, narcissism and decreased social skills. As a Behavioral Scientist, I wonder what causes this paradox? The narratives we share and portray on social media are all positive and celebratory. It’s a hybridized digital version of “Keeping up with the Joneses”. Meaning for some, sometimes it appears everyone you know are in great relationships, taking 5-star vacations and living your dream life. However, what is shared across our social networks only broadcasts the positive aspects of our lives-the highlight reels. Since we’re only getting people’s highlight reels and comparing it to ourselves, it is natural to have reactions to what we’re watching. How does this impact relationships, dating and our love lives? I conducted in-depth interviews with men and women, ranging from ages 28-73, that are active social media users and found that:
60% of people using social media reported that it has impacted their self-esteem in a negative way
50% reported social media having negative effects on their relationships
80% reported that is easier to be deceived by others through their sharing on social media
Match reported 51% say social media has made them feel more self-conscious about their appearance. Flores further explains “research has also shown that Face book users are becoming increasingly depressed from comparing themselves to their own profile.
Meaning that if a person’s reality does not match the digital illusion they post on their profiles, emotionally, one may feel they are not living up to the “best” form of themselves.”
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/social-medias-impact-on-self-esteem_us_58ade038e4b0d818c4f0a4e4
The Focus of Family
As members of a family, we need to focus on the family. The family is the Laboratory of Love. Our spouses and our children are gifts from God and the interactions that we have with our immediate family is how we are to learn to love. It all starts in the family. Open discussion about feeling sad or feeling depressed are a good place to start. These things should be addressed and we as members of our families should always emphasize the family as the most important unit of support in difficulty times. From thirty years of experience working in emergency rooms and dealing with countless patients thinking about suicide or actually going through with an attempt, one of the biggest risks for repeated attempts had to do with social support at home. Family.
If you think about social media and cell phones and distractions, those types of things take us away from what we were meant to be doing in the laboratory of love. We are meant to be loving, caring and supporting each other in deep and meaningful ways. It all starts in the Laboratory of Love. The Family.
In my book Brave the Wave, I use the near death experience of Howard Storm and how he describes his “life review” in his book, “My Descent Into Death”,
The angels and Jesus shared their feelings of joy with me when love was expressed, and they shared their disappointment and sadness when we hurt one another. God had put my mother, father, sisters and me together to love and support one another in our life’s journey to grow in love and spirit.…
In my life review, I had to turn away numerous times when I saw myself treating my children in unloving ways. The most unloving thing I did was to be at times so obsessed with my concerns that I was indifferent to their needs. I’m sorry for the occasions when I was impatient or cruel to my daughter and son. The most disturbing behaviors I witnessed in my life review were the times when I cared more about my career as an artist and college professor than about their need to be loved. The emotional abandonment of my children was devastating to review.
Emotional abandonment. That is a pretty good description of what happens to our family relationships and the relationships we have with our friends when we are focused on distractions and social media. Those relationships get relegated to the back burner. That is the exact opposite of what God had in mind.
Look at that line, “the angels and Jesus shared their feelings of joy with me when love was expressed”.
That is our job. We as believers are in the love business. Business should be booming. THAT is how we counteract the negative consequences of the distractions of social media and cell phones. We lead with love. We listen. We support and love one another. Each of us is the solution to the problem. When a child feels down and depressed, we as parents or siblings are the answer.
As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. (John 15:9-12 NLT)