Suicide in elementary school: increase among black children

Youth suicide is a big problem – the second leading cause of death in adolescents in the US – but research into trends has made young children more likely to be excluded, say authors who analyze the numbers. Their analysis relates only to the 5-11 year group and finds that while the overall rate has remained stable, an increasing proportion of young black children have been victims of suicide.
The increase in young black children who commit suicide is mainly from boys, although there has also been an increasing rate of black girls who died without self-assessment through suicide, while the rate among white girls remained stable.

Within the stable suicide rates that have averaged 33 children in the United States in the past two decades, fewer white children were affected while more black children succumbed.

To reach this conclusion, the US death rates for the United States were from 1993 to 2012 JAMA pediatrics Journal Report, and the divergent trend was shown by:

Increased rates among black children, from 1.36 suicide deaths to 2.54 per million
Decreased rates in white children from 1.14 to 0.77 per million children.

The study’s lead author is epidemiologist and suicide researcher Jeffrey Bridge, PhD, of the research institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. With colleagues, Bridge also made the following results:

657 children between the ages of 5 and 11 died from suicide between 1993 and 2012
Most of these children, 84%, were boys (553 of them compared to 104 girls)
The rate of all suicides in the US in the age group of the total population remained stable, for example in the event of one million children being killed.

The report’s conclusion states that the inequality in the number of suicides among young black children is significant and requires action.

"The stable suicide rate among US children aged 5 to 11 years during 20 years of study masked a significant increase in suicide rate in black children and a significant decrease in suicide rate in white children", the authors write.

From a public health perspective, future steps should include ongoing monitoring to monitor these emerging trends and research to identify risks associated with suicide, protective and triggering factors in primary school children to set goals for early detection and culturally-based interventions. "

The increase in young black children who commit suicide is mainly from boys, although there has also been an increasing rate of black girls who died without self-assessment through suicide, while the rate among white girls remained stable.

The leading cause of death for children in the age group was suffocation / suffocation – 514 of the 657 suicide deaths, or 78%. The use of firearms resulted in 116 suicides (18%) and 27 in other ways (4%).

U.S. National Death Rates

The authors used data on causes of death that were kept by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and were made publicly available through the WISQARS database.

Research published last month also used CDC data to analyze child suicide, and death, which was prevalent in the current analysis of younger children, contrasts with the results in this report for older children.

The March 2015 report, also in JAMA pediatrics found that just over half of the 66,595 youth and young adult suicides registered in the United States between early 1996 and late 2010 were committed with a firearm.

One of the key findings is that youth suicide in rural areas is more than just urban – but location statistics have not been broken down by the new study for younger children.

Because of the overall lower number of suicide rates among those over the age of 11, the latest study did not examine trends in subgroups such as suicide through poisoning. It was also unable to analyze changes in the methods of young girls over time – the rate of female deaths was too low for this.

The authors discuss and understand the greater understanding of suicide among adolescents, although rates in children ages 12 to 19 "are about 50 times higher than suicide rates in children aged 5 to 11 years," Investing in suicide prevention approaches ", Pre-suicidal behavior could have great potential to lower suicide rates among adolescents. "

They provide an example of such an approach, an elementary school-based behavior management intervention that uses team play and rewards to reduce aggressive and disruptive class behavior:

"A long-term follow-up study of students randomly assigned to either the good-behavior game or standard-setting classrooms in the first and second class showed an almost 50 percent reduction in suicide attempts between the ages of 19 and 21.

"Future research should determine the effect of good behavior play in preventing suicidal thoughts and behaviors in children and examine early adolescents."

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U.S. National Death Rates

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