[HN Gopher] The mystifying rise of child suicide
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The mystifying rise of child suicide
Author : IdEntities
Score : 27 points
Date : 2022-04-04 21:50 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| Overtonwindow wrote:
| The article goes out of its way to avoid discussing the damage
| the pandemic and the lockdowns did to children. We will reap that
| mistake for a long time.
| travisathougies wrote:
| Exactly, I remember distinctly at age 16 thinking my life was
| going to be ruined because my parents wouldn't let me 'party'
| [1] during high school. Children have neither perspectitve nor
| sense, nor should they be expected to be. The truth is two
| years of little socialization and stimulation may be okay for
| mentally well adults, but it is criminal to impose that on
| children
|
| [1] As in... my parents had a curfew and didn't let me
| drink..., so totally normal rules for a high schooler, but I
| felt that the world was ending and everything was so unfair.
| saila wrote:
| It would be criminal to allow children to rampantly spread
| COVID too, even if they themselves were/are at low risk.
| Imagine the damage when a child brings home COVID and one of
| their parents ends up dying or even "just" disabled with long
| COVID. There's no simple answer here.
| travisathougies wrote:
| Parents of a normal age (which these seem to be) are
| extremely unlikely to die from COVID. This is just fear
| mongering.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| It explicitly mentions it several times.. did we read the same
| article?
|
| > _Although it is too early to quantify fully the long-term
| impact of the pandemic, it has exacerbated the burgeoning
| crisis. The C.D.C. found that in 2020 mental-health-related
| visits to hospital emergency departments by people between the
| ages of twelve and twenty-seven were a third higher than in
| 2019. The C.D.C. also reported that, during the first seven
| months of lockdown, U.S. hospitals experienced a twenty-four-
| per-cent increase in mental-health-related emergency visits for
| children aged five to eleven, and a thirty-one-per-cent
| increase for those aged twelve to seventeen. Among the general
| population, suicides declined, but this change masks a slight
| increase among younger people and a spike among the country's
| Black, Latinx, and Native American populations. Last October,
| the American Academy of Pediatrics declared that the pandemic
| had accelerated the worrying trends in child and adolescent
| mental health, resulting in what it described as a "national
| emergency."_
| saila wrote:
| "Although it is too early to quantify fully the long-term
| impact of the pandemic, it has exacerbated the burgeoning
| crisis..."
| scarmig wrote:
| Oddly, the article doesn't mention anything about gender roles or
| the disproportionate impact of suicide on young boys, even though
| they commit suicide at 4x the rate of young girls[0]. This is
| especially odd because the author of the article does feel
| comfortable discussing other demographic trends, like elevated
| rates among LGBT and non-white youth, even though those trends
| are much smaller in magnitude than that of boys compared to
| girls.
|
| [0] https://www.kidsdata.org/topic/210/suicides-gender/table
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| dang wrote:
| Please point it out without taking HN threads further into
| flamewar. That doesn't do anybody any good.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| I'm merely pointing out a fact. That this is contentious in
| and of itself shows how aggressively apathetic society is
| towards boys.
|
| I'm especially concerned about the mental health of young
| white boys in this country and I say that as a brown man.
|
| Racism is rooted in insecurity. Those little boys will grow
| up into men and the way they are treated now will affect us
| all negatively in the future.
| scarmig wrote:
| I'm obviously sympathetic to your concerns, but
| particularly when it comes to pointing out things that
| don't mesh with the mainstream narrative, it's most
| effective to state the facts and let them speak for
| themselves. That's enough to get people interested in the
| truth to draw their own conclusions.
| dang wrote:
| "No one gives a shit about young boys" is not a fact.
| That's flamewar rhetoric.
|
| I realize that you're expressing a feeling there and I'm
| sure the feeling is a good and well-intentioned one, but
| the problem is that inflammatory rhetoric like that, on
| the internet, just runs into other people's intense
| feelings and blows up. Then we get a dumb and nasty
| thread instead of a thoughtful curious one.
|
| There are much better ways to express your concerns that
| don't break the HN guidelines. I'm just asking you to use
| one of those ways, instead of this way.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| saila wrote:
| The abstract you linked to says "female youth more often
| attempt suicide," which might indicate that girls are more
| troubled growing up.
|
| It also mentions other gender differences.
| scarmig wrote:
| It's also odd that somehow the fact that boys commit suicide
| at four times the rate of girls can be used as a soapbox to
| try to prove that girls are more troubled growing up.
|
| But the point here is that the article omits this critical
| fact, even though being male identified is overwhelmingly the
| strongest demographic factor indicating risk of suicide.
| Doesn't that warrant at least a sentence?
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Girls attempt it more, boys succeed more.
|
| It's not entirely unreasonable to suggest that "more
| attempts overall" = "more troubled"
|
| Maybe boys are overall less troubled than girls but just
| choose more effective forms of suicide.
|
| Maybe boys choose more effective forms of suicide because
| they are in fact way more troubled.
|
| Really though, it's not a competition. We should be able to
| help both boys and girls, in ways that are effective for
| each group.
| thr0wawayf00 wrote:
| The abstract also makes the distinction that boys are much
| more successful in actually committing suicide than girls, so
| I don't see how this proves that girls are more troubled.
| candiodari wrote:
| Strange how little attention is given to the perspective of
| Trevor:
|
| 1) he was intense, smarter than his peers (probably a lot), and
| also physicially superior to them. You might think this is good,
| but think about it for 5 seconds: it's extremely isolating.
|
| 2) he got rejected ... and rejected ... and rejected. First, by
| his classmates and schoolmates ... then
|
| 3) the schools responded to this, not by figuring out both sides
| of the story, but by dumping schools him, despite Trevor
| obviously putting in extra effort to satisfy everything demanded
| of him
|
| 4) Trevor's skiing is striking: clearly, 99.9% of the time,
| Trevor was using willpower to satisfy whatever he thought others
| wanted of him. He must have done this a _lot_ since even in
| situations where it was beyond obvious nobody suspected this is
| what he was doing.
|
| 5) it is mentioned that both of his parents had similar habits.
| Both parents were driven, and kind, really trying to help people.
|
| This paints an entirely different picture, doesn't it?
|
| In short confrontations with others, Trevor was irresistibly
| nice. In longer confrontations (willpower will falter
| occasionally), nobody likes him (because he _is_ superior to the
| other children).
|
| And of course, the problem these parents and children have with
| this ... is how it affects _them_. That, perhaps, they ... how to
| put it ... "weren't letting Trevor be Trevor", does not register
| to anyone at all. That they put him through hell, probably asking
| more and more of him, until he lost control, then punished him,
| and then dumped him ... not a second's thought is wasted on that.
| Everyone is just protecting themselves, and most are simply
| protecting themselves
|
| Trevor wasn't depressed at all, I'd bet. I bet he was working on
| 5 side projects the week he killed himself.
|
| What would have helped? _NOT_ rejecting him. Certainly not
| throwing him out of school. Instead, provide him with a real
| challenge. But for the same reason these people can 't see what
| happened (they're completely caught up in their own feelings),
| they couldn't allow Trevor to, for instance, move up a grade (or
| two). That, obviously, would have hurt _many_ feelings.
|
| Trevor killed himself because he was rejected by everyone around
| him because he performed better than them, and because probably
| his parents and everyone else kept repeating to him that this
| happened because he still wasn't good enough. Reality is that he
| cared deeply about people who couldn't give a rat's ass about
| him, thought his life worth less than satisfying their immediate
| feeling on the spot, and after the x-thousandth dumping he got
| blamed for for reasons he couldn't understand, he ended it. He
| died because he was not average, trying to be better, in a sea of
| people who cannot deal with even a fleeting moment of impression
| that someone might be better than them, or that they might need
| to put in some work to catch up to him.
| thr0wawayf00 wrote:
| I've struggled with suicidal thoughts throughout my entire life,
| as far back as I can remember. Both of my parents struggle with
| untreated mental illness that had a major impact on my
| upbringing. They were often very emotionally abusive and sometime
| physically abusive throughout my childhood. There was no such
| thing as positive reinforcement in our household, we lived our
| childhoods just trying not be punished and it was at times very
| difficult. When I went through a divorce in my early 30's, I
| called my mom to break the news and she responded by screaming at
| the top of her lungs at me. She would later tell me that she was
| trying to scare me into making sure that I had made the right
| decision. That night was closest I had come to crossing the
| rubicon in many years. I still don't fully understand how a
| mother could talk their child this way in such a difficult
| moment, but such is life.
|
| Years later, I was diagnosed with ADHD which answered so many
| deep questions about why I am the way I am (and why my parents
| are the way they are). Life is simply harder for folks with ADHD,
| we struggle with executive function in ways that neurotypical
| folks don't often think about.
|
| Strangely, one of most impactful moments towards reducing my
| recurring suicidal thoughts involved magic mushrooms. During a
| trip, I visualized telling all of the people in my life that I
| wanted to leave, explaining in detail why I didn't want to live
| anymore. It was the first time that I gave myself the space to
| ask myself if I really, truly wanted to leave. And I realized
| that I wasn't ready. Not yet.
| dang wrote:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20220404223206/https://www.newyor...
|
| https://archive.ph/NIRCs
| WalterBright wrote:
| My hypothesis, unencumbered with any evidence, is that modern
| society and parents have gotten very good at shielding small
| children from adversity and failure of any sort.
|
| Hence, the children do not acquire any ability to deal with
| adversity and failure.
|
| When they get older, parents can no longer control their
| environment such that they do not experience failure. By then the
| failures are more serious and the kids have no coping skills.
| ausbah wrote:
| amazing how people can be so bold as to share their uninformed
| opinion even when they acknowledge it's uninformed
| goat_whisperer wrote:
| Ah yes, let me guess -- you had to walk 5 miles in the snow to
| school everyday, uphill both ways, right?
| travisathougies wrote:
| It's sad but when I read about children who are 'precocious', I
| think either their parents are driving them too hard, or (because
| of the example of a 4th grade boy bringing a girl to a school
| event...) there's been some sexual / emotional abuse [1]. None of
| what is being described here is normal childhood behavior, which
| makes sense, since the family is not at all normal. Both parents
| are hotshot career-focused individuals. It begs the question if
| the kids ever had time to just be kids. As I've discovered over
| the years going from a 'work hard, play hard' youth to a more
| mellow adult, is that balance is the key, and most people today
| simply lack it, and these parents sure sound like it.
|
| I mean... just reading about their life before the suicides
| already stressed me out.
|
| EDIT: Also, the article spent very little time talking about the
| human impact of COVID lockdowns (it mentioned them, but did not
| dwell). Passages like this:
|
| > I asked Angela if we could come by for a condolence call. She
| said yes, if we were vaccinated. Because vaccines were not yet
| available to children, she added, "Don't bring George." She
| paused, then explained, "It's just--because of Agnes. She can't
| get vaccinated yet, either. And she's all I have left." In the
| following weeks, Angela told her story over and over to any
| friend who asked, as though she could contain it through
| repetition. For Billy, even conversational boilerplate was a
| struggle.
|
| Make me think the parents were a bit over the top with regards to
| covid lockdowns. Children not being able to see friends? Human
| companionship (physical presence) is a basic human need on par
| with food and water. No one's surprised when a child dies from
| lack of food. Lack of intimate friendship is the same.
|
| EDIT 2:
|
| > Trevor, the child of well-off, educated parents, had far better
| mental-health support than most American children, but was not
| saved by it
|
| In my experience, it's better to come from a lower middle class
| family (so enough money to eat and have everything you _need_ ,
| but not too much), than to come from outright wealth. Money is
| not a solution to every problem, and too much money and luxury is
| the root cause of many mental illness.
|
| [1] I wrote this comment before reading the article, but the
| article later goes on to talk about how we was abused. I don't
| want to say 'I told you so', but the signs were all there. It's
| interesting... the New Yorker doesn't even stop to question
| whether the rise in child suicide rates may be due to a rise in
| child sex abuse.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Just because a family doesn't want hundreds of acquaintances
| visiting their home does not imply that their children were
| unable to see their friends. Many families throughout the COVID
| era have adopted the stable cohort, where the people in that
| cohort freely intermix, but limit interactions and take
| precautions with outsiders.
| oneoff786 wrote:
| > Both parents are hotshot career-focused individuals. It begs
| the question if the kids ever had time to just be kids.
|
| Yeah I'm gonna doubt that. Not that dual career households
| don't have their own difficulties but that's nothing compared
| to the effects of poverty. The article mentions a huge effect
| size of being black. I would guess wealthy families have
| drastically lower rates of child suicide.
| cflewis wrote:
| Honestly I just think we all think kids should have easier
| lives, but they are never going to get that idealized
| version, be it poverty, war, issues with the family,
| racism... the list goes on and on.
|
| We can only try to do the best with the tools we have, but
| the candy-coated life we think kids should have I doubt ever
| really existed. Maybe in the nuclear family 1950s. If you
| were white, at least.
| travisathougies wrote:
| I would imagine there's a U shaped curve. If you have too
| little and can't feed yourself / meet basic needs, I imagine
| suicide is a problem. If you have too much and can't spend
| time with your kids because you're working too much (mom
| being a hot shot lawyer and dad being a hotshot financier is
| not a 'normal' situation), then I imagine it's also a
| problem.
|
| Both money and family time are necessary for kids to thrive.
| If you have one and not the other, it's going to be a
| problem.
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