School shootings and plummeting mental health in teens is an epidemic. U.S. suicide rates increased more than 25% since 1999.
Are you sick of these headlines? Take action.
Next time your high school’s 5-year reunion pops up, tell the fundraising committee you want to create a mental health fund that goes towards counseling and education. Send the message that adolescent and teen mental health is paramount. If your class reunion is not around the corner then ask your school if they have such a fund. Get a conversation started if not.
I went to a small private school that was a second home to me. My classmates became my extended family. 5 years ago, while planning our 20th reunion, I friended a classmate on Facebook and saw unusual posts that signified a mental health crisis.
While trying to get help I was met with much resistance. I tried to reach the FBI and 2 days later I was told that he had committed suicide one day earlier. Now 5 years later as I update my class list for our 25th reunion, I have 2 more greyed out names; 3 out of our 100 classmates have lost their lives secondary to mental health problems.
We read in the news that shooters in school shootings have many warning signs.
Why did they not get help? Are we too cowardly to address our role? Are children not provided the tools to help their peers or to reach authorities?
Statistics show a steep increase in anxiety in teens. This is a precursor to depression, suicide, and in the recent 2 decades- gun violence. I fled a local shooting by running to my car. I lost a cousin in a mass shooting wherein more than a dozen people were killed. Two years ago I was scared to stand with my colleagues at a gun regulation rally. I hate living with fear, but I have also realized that I can help children get the mental health services they need. The story is always the same, the shooter showed signs that were ignored. NO one wanted to step in. Let’s change things. Call your local school and make a change.
For my patients in Orange County I have posted resources for mental health on my blog.
To get immediate help call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255).
There is also a crisis text line.
For statistics on mental health see the below articles:
Suicide rates among America’s young people continue to soar, study shows
Suicide rates among young people have continued to soar in recent years — so much so that the rate among 15- to 24-year-olds climbed in 2017 to its highest point since 2000, new research has found.
An increase was especially seen among 15- to 19-year-olds and young men, according to a research paper published Tuesday in the medical journal JAMA. The finding hits close to home for the paper’s first author, Oren Miron, a research associate at Harvard Medical School.
Number of children going to ER with suicidal thoughts, attempts doubles, study finds
“In high school, a friend of mine was bullied, and he unfortunately took his life,” Miron said. “He had such a brilliant future ahead of him, if he just made it two more years through high school.”
Now, “our new information shows that suicide [among] adolescents has reached its highest recorded level, and it shows that there’s especially an increase in recent years in adolescent males,” he said. “The data shows that it is a very real threat.”
The research involved data on deaths in the United States among 15- to 24-year-olds between 2000 and 2017. The data came from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Underlying Cause of Death database.
- Among teens 15 to 19, the suicide rate was 8 per 100,000 people in 2000 and then
increased to 11.8 per 100,000 in 2017. - Among young adults 20 to 24, the suicide rate was 12.5 per 100,000 people in
2000 and then rose to 17 per 100,000 in 2017, the data showed. - Overall in 2017, there were 6,241 suicides among young people aged 15 to 24, of
whom 5,016 were young men and 1,225 were young women, the researchers
found.
The research had some limitations, including that the causes of death in the data were based on death certificates, which can be subject to error, or it could suggest that the observed increase in suicide deaths may reflect more accurate reporting in certificates.
The research also did not examine factors behind the increase in suicide rates. “Future studies should examine possible contributing factors and attempt to develop prevention measures by understanding the causes for the decrease in suicides found in the late 1990s,” the researchers wrote.
While the research highlights a dramatic surge in suicide rates among young people, “this is unfortunately not a surprise,” said Nadine Kaslow, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Emory University School of Medicine and chief psychologist at the Grady Health System in Atlanta, who was not involved in the new paper.
Other studies have found increases in suicide rates, especially among adolescents and young adults, but the new research “adds a couple of points; one is noting this particular increase in young males and also in this younger age group of 15 to 19,” Kaslow said.
Identifying why there has been an increase remains a topic of interest among experts, she added, but it appears to be multifactorial.
“There have been a number of things that people have talked about lately. One is just sort of increasing rates of psychological pain or psychological distress in young people — more anxiety and more depression — and I think that’s for a number of reasons,” Kaslow said.
Some reasons, Kaslow said, could be that family and community structures may not be as tight-knit as in the past, leading to increased risk, or that the increased use of technology has led to young people spending less time on cultivating rich, in-person relationships and more time being exposed to possible cyberbullying.
“I don’t think it’s the using of technology that’s the problem, but I think it can be how that affects your relationships and the cyberbullying issue,” she said.
“There’s growing evidence now that cyberbullying is associated with depression,
with self-harm and suicidal thoughts and even death by suicide.”
