We Know How To Prevent Youth Suicide. And We Must.

Why do so many of our children and youth end their lives? Recent news reports show that hospitalizations resulting from suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts among children ages 5 to 17 doubled between 2008 and 2015, with 15- to 17-year-olds showing the greatest increase. The news comes less than a year after my dear friends lost their adolescent son Jack to suicide and just three years after the U.S. National Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the rate of deaths by suicide had doubled for children ages 10 to 14 between 2007 and 2014. The painful reality is that society’s youngest members are turning to suicide with sustained, increasing frequency, representing a tsunami of anguish among survivors and a profound social failure. We can and must change that. As the head of Covenant House, a charity across 30 cities that each year reaches more than 50,000 homeless, trafficked and at-risk children and youth, I find the data appalling and alarming. As a father, I have seen up close the burdens of teen depression, and I know full well what it is like to mistake the signs of despair with the typical symptoms of adolescent angst. This hits very close to home for my wife and me. We urgently need more research into the causes for this precipitous rise in the number of children who feel life is not worth living. Some experts blame the prevalence of cyber-bullying, and, in that same vein, the feelings of isolation and exclusion unleashed by social media. You&rsq...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news