June 28, 2017
Stressful environments and unfettered access to information may have boosted the number of teens and children hospitalized for suicidal thoughts or actions.
A new study found that children’s hospital admissions of patients 5 to 17 years old for such thoughts or actions more than doubled from 2008 to 2015. The study looked at 32 hospitals using data from the Pediatric Health Information System (PHIS)
When patients are hospitalized, doctors consider family history, worldview, and social environments. School systems are becoming “more and more challenging,” said Dr. Dan Nelson of the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. Nelson, medical director of the center’s child psychiatry unit, noted concerns about weapons and bullying.
News about the increased in suicide-related hospitalizations of children and teens comes amid an ongoing outbreak of youth suicide in Hamilton County, where Cincinnati is located.
In 2014, the county saw four suicides of people 18 and under. In 2015, there were five. In 2016, there were 13. So far this year, seven.
The most shocking was the January death of 8-year-old Gabriel Taye, who killed himself two days after peers knocked him unconscious in a restroom at Cincinnati’s Carson Elementary School. A security camera video shows other students touched and kicked Gabriel until an administrator arrived and roused him. A Cincinnati homicide detective described it as bullying that bordered on criminal assault.
The study on hospitalizations from Vanderbilt University comes in the wake of a national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report from November. The CDC found the suicide rate for children age 10 to 14 doubled from 2007 to 2014. Suicide overtook motor vehicle accidents as a cause of death in that age group, the report showed.
The Vanderbilt study found that children’s hospitals saw higher rates of suicidal patients during the fall and the spring, but not during the summer.
“There is a seasonality to suicide,” said Dr. Gregory Plemmons, the lead author on the study. “If you look at adult data, most adults tend to commit suicide in summer and the spring, we noticed that our biggest time (for children) was in the fall.”
Plemmons, an associate professor at Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt in Nashville, said he’s seen the increase of young suicidal patients first-hand.
“We’re definitely seeing it in our hospital,” he said. “We’ve actually had to hire extra people to support this population.”
In addition to a rise in suicidal thoughts, Plemmons has seen young people engaging in “more dramatic ways” of harming themselves.
Read more at USAToday.com
