CT Mirror: Connecticut Is Seeing a Rise In Youth Suicides
A few years ago, Dr. Steven Rogers, a physician in the emergency department at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center, started a new initiative. He wanted to screen every child age 10 and up who passed through the department for suicide risk. That’s around 15,000 kids a year.
“There’s lots of stigma around this question,” Rogers said. “I’d rather be able to identify kids who are low risk and need help versus when they’re an imminent risk or have already made an attempt.”
In Connecticut, 11 children have died by suicide so far this year, nine of those in the past few months. To put that in perspective, just six children 17 and younger died by suicide in all of 2023.
“I hope this isn’t a canary in the coal mine,” said Gov. Ned Lamont in late August at a roundtable event on youth suicide.
There were no clusters of deaths, according to the Office of the Child Advocate, and deaths were distributed across the state, as well as among races and genders. The children were between the ages of 13 and 17.
“We have a problem,” Sarah Eagan, Connecticut’s child advocate, said during the roundtable. She said most children who die by suicide in Connecticut die by asphyxiation, and in recent years, the age of those children is skewing younger.
“We have work to do,” Eagan said, “and that work is not done until no child is bereft and alone, not knowing where to call, and there is no parent who … can’t sleep not knowing if they’re doing the right thing for their child.”
For Rogers, the summer’s high numbers were especially hard to take in.
“It feels like a failure, especially for somebody who has committed a good part of their career to identifying kids at risk,” he said.
Connecticut Children’s effort is just one example of a broadened push to respond to the youth mental health crisis in the state, one that has become increasingly urgent since the COVID pandemic. But even before the pandemic, Rogers was adamant that the screening tool was needed. Suicide is the No. 2 cause of death in children 10 and older, trailing unintentional injuries.
With nearly 1-in-5 of children screened showing positive signs of suicide, it's important that we talk to the young people we know and not just assume we know what's going on.
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