Suicides Among Kids Ages 8 to 12 Are Rising, Especially Among Girls

The following is excerpted from an online article posted by HealthDay.

New data shows a troubling 8% annual increase in the number of American children ages 8 to 12 who died by suicide, with the sharpest increase seen among girls.

Suicide has now become the fifth leading cause of death among both male and female preteens, report a team led by Donna Ruch, of Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.

Ruch works at the hospital’s Center for Suicide Prevention and Research. Her team published its findings in the journal JAMA Network Open.

Rising rates of suicides among children have set off alarm bells for experts in recent years.

“In 2021, the National Institute of Mental Health convened a research roundtable series to address the rising rates of suicides in preteens, defined as youths aged 8 to 12 years,” Ruch’s group noted.

They said that, until now, there’s been little good data on suicides among preteens.

To help remedy that, the Ohio group looked at data for 2001 through 2022 from a major federal online database that lists the underlying cause of death for U.S. preteens.

Overall, 2,241 preteens are known to have died by suicide during the more than two decades covered by the database.

Initially, there was a encouraging downward trend in these deaths between 2001 and 2007, Ruch’s group noted.

However, beginning in 2008, that trend reversed.

Each year after 2007, there’s been an 8.2% annual increase in preteen suicide cases.

Preteen suicide is still exceedingly rare: Between 2001 and 2007, there were 3.3 such cases per 1 million population, Ruch’s team noted.

By 2022, that number had risen to 5.7 per million, however.

In sheer numbers, preteen boys are still more likely to die by suicide compared to girls, with almost double the number of deaths.

But the rate at which young girls die by suicide is rising, more than tripling over the study time period. This trend reveals “a narrowing of the historically large gap in youth suicide rates between sexes,” the researchers noted.

Whereas suicide was the 11th leading cause of death for preteen girls in 2007, by 2022 it became the 5th leading cause — similar to boys.

Source: HealthDay
https://www.healthday.com/health-news/mental-health/suicides-among-kids-ages-8-to-12-are-rising-especially-among-girls