The mystifying rise of child suicide
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
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.
Then Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents may offer some insight [1].
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23129659-adult-children-...
From everything we know about the dramatic effectiveness of psychedelics in treating depression in adults, I am cautiously optimistic that one day they'll be shown to be as effective in children as well (given the right therapeutic protocol, set, and setting).
Yes, and also, at least for me, poetry, i.e., Sexton: "Poetry led me by the hand out of madness." Rumi writes, "Choose love! Choose love! / Enter the rose garden, / let your soul make peace with the thorns."
Psilocybin aka (Magic Mushrooms) : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psilocybin
Psilocybin Mushrooms : https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Psilocybin_mushrooms
Psychoactive Substance Index : https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Psychoactive_substance_index
Psychedelic Therapy aka (Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy) : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychedelic_therapy
SearX > psychedelic-assisted-therapy : <https://search.snopyta.org/search?q=psychedelic-assisted-the...>
- Edit: Remember! Always Consulate your Doctor / Psychiatrist
Asking because often, people with some traits will click will similar minded people, anxious with anxious etc, which doesn't help rewiring your brain. And I assume having various kinds of people around helps finding better models, for expression, handling emotions, etc etc
take care
I'm not saying it would have made the difference or any such awful thing. But video games can be a nice time-killer when life is being shitty and you need a way to just... get through it.
If your kid is suffering and nothing you're doing is working and he's self-medicating... maybe it's working. Not everything kids do for themselves is some vice that you have to protect them from.
While watching it I’d feel much better and usually feel better after as well.
From my experience, putting someone in a hospital or other treatment facility is often presented as the only way you can get help for serious conditions, but for most people, the idea of being sent away to a hospital or other facility for an extended period of time can be very damaging, especially in the immediate term. For people who need that level of care, the feeling of being abandoned, or that your friends/family can't deal with you anymore or don't want you around.
You also have the fact that for a lot of people who end up in these facilities, do so because they have been forced in some way, shape or form to be there. Couple that with these places often feeling less like hospitals or places of medicine and treatment, and more like prisons, these environments can make you feel like a criminal or unwanted member of society.
Finally, while I don't want to paint all who work in places like this with the same brush, my experiences have shown me that it is not that uncommon for the doctors and support staff who work in these places to be somewhat uncaring to those in their care. And, while I understand that working in a place like this would obviously have a significant impact on your own mental health and make you jaded, from my experience what a lot of people who end up in these places want more than anything is empathy and compassion.
I'm not saying that we should abolish hospital treatment for mental health, because this kind of treatment in a lot of cases is both necessary and effective. My thoughts here are that for cases like Trevor, there should be some kind of service or help available that provides the right degree of ongoing care without having to upend a persons life in ways that can be damaging.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Trevor’s mother, Angela Matthews, a driven intellectual-property lawyer in her early forties, studied ballet and still carries herself like a dancer. Her intelligence and the intensity of her character can make her intimidating, but she is also given to acts of tremendous kindness. Trevor’s father, Billy Matthews, who works in finance, is affable and athletic. They have a daughter, Agnes, three and a half years younger than Trevor; Billy also has two sons, Trey and Tristen, from a previous marriage.
To extrapolate from this that they are over consumed with work and failed to parent their child seems like an extreme and frankly offensive claim. The term “hot shot” is never used and even if it had been, says nothing about their availability as a parent. You can be a hot shot at your career and still be available.
The problem for this child is, unquestionably, that he was the victim of a sexual predator at a camp.
The prevalence of these super career oriented, damagingly absent parents is for sure much rarer than implied. And probably not even a strong predictor of being neglectful parents
Awesome. I still stand by everything I said.
> (2) your statements assume, without possibility of falsification, that such mental illness is not at all due to environmental factors
No, they quite obviously don't. I'm pointing out the difficulty of knowing what contributed to a child's death in the context of mental illness, which can be both genetic and environmental in origin, and is not always in a parent's ability to influence. You can have two perfectly nice parents raise a literal psychopath and no one knows why. Happens all the time.
The idea that you can ignore this and zero in on the parents based on the info in this article is completely contrary to our scientific understanding of child (and adult) psychology.
The abuse, on the other hand, is obviously an important contributor, as you said. No dispute there.
Okay, I can’t say I thought they were going to talk about a bite visible the next day. Not saying it isn’t violence, just not what I was expecting with that lead-in.
[0] https://www.kidsdata.org/topic/210/suicides-gender/table
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?
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.
I agree it's not a competition. But pointing out demographic trends and that some groups are more likely to commit suicide doesn't mean that you think other groups don't deserve attention and support.
It's unclear why you're telling me it's not a competition for pointing out exactly that; the article does the exact same thing (except with LGBT youth and nonwhite youth), but it'd be silly for someone to come in and say that the author is trying to turn it into a competition.
It's especially galling that you're accusing me of trying to turn it into a competition when the comment I was replying to (and you yourself!) jumped in entirely out of the blue to argue that girls have it worse, while I made no statement that boys have it worse.
Why would you assume my words were "accusing" you of anything, rather than just a general observation as part of a conversation that people are having? Presumably the OP you were responding to would potentially also read my reply to you and also see what I am saying.
Or maybe I was just trying to head off people replying to my own post accusing me of making it into a competition, by making it clear that I have already considered that and agree with it, but still felt the rest of my post was a contribution to the discussion.
So there are certainly gender differences, but it's not clear that it's a difference of intent.
It's also really easy to screw it up, and many people do, some even after many attempts.
Not everybody is super diligent in researching the most effective methods, and some people may be genuine in their desire to die but are impulsive about it so may not choose the most effective method in their desperation to kill themselves now.
I'm not sure if we as outsiders are in any position to judge the sincerity of another's wish to die.
In individual cases, you may be right. But I think it's best to try to find the truth when talking about something so impactful as suicide as a general phenomenon.
And I am of course not denying that genuine attempts at suicide can fail. But that seems unlikely to be the key to understanding the massive gender disparities at hand here.
Unsatisfied with good suicide attempts going to waste, 4chan has found a method that's cheap, widely available, effective even with medical attention, and leaves the body completely unmarked.
The reason women don't succeed is because they aren't as serious and therefore chooses dosages or methods where you are very unlikely to die, as can be seen in this study for example:
https://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12...
The statistics regarding suicide don't prove that boys are less valued than girls. That's my only point here.
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.
I find it funny you call me out for being honest.
The internet and mass media have 'de-smallified' our world, in that we're in constant exposure to those who have made it. They tell us their secrets, how they made it, and when it doesn't work for us, we get blame ourselves and take our failures as personal. There is an extreme selection bias for success in what we see in the world.
Failure, in that same sense, is hidden. Kids don't see it except on rare occasions where it can be spun positively. Kids aren't exposed to the real grinding failures of just trying to get by.
So we have two very different distributions forming childhood mental frameworks about what success looks like. Likewise, exposure is more and more purely digital. There's no grounding in any of this, or acknowledgement that most of why anything happens is due to circumstance and random chance.
Youth get put in a situation where success is effectively (based on their abilities and view of success) impossible.
If the end result is to obtain coping skills, what exactly are these skills? Are they only obtainable during childhood? Are there examples of adults who lack coping skills yet had "unshielded" lives?
Our muscles get stronger by stressing them to failure. Is there any inherent reason the mind does not respond the same way?
Me, I walked to kindergarten both ways, about a 3/4 mile walk, by myself. These days, it would be considered child neglect. I was one of those "free range" kids, as were all the others.
I received one of the last chemistry sets that contained a bunsen burner, copper sulphate, and experiments with hydrochloric acid. I grew up just before the "everyone is a winner" movement. In high school, my preoccupation was shredding tires on my Mustang. At about that time, the cops finally shut down the high school drags in downtown Phoenix, just before I was able to participate. What a drag :-/
I got an Eagle scout with zero involvement of my parents. I had my own business for spending money. I got into fist fights with other boys. I build a flame thrower out of a lawnmower. My mom despaired as the driveway was black with tire marks.
It was a good time to be a boy. And in no way was I different from the other boys. We'd shred their tires, too. During my entire K-12 time, the only two deaths in the entire schools were two boys who got smacked by running into traffic. No suicides.
I feel kinda sorry for later generations with their helicopter parents.
This is immediate feedback loop.
>> Me, I walked to kindergarten both ways...
You've lead a great life and had great opportunities, I'm so happy for you, but this type of self-righteousness is completely insensitive in this serious and complex issue.
>> I feel kinda sorry for later generations with their helicopter parents.
This is an insensitive thing to say.
Not being immediately consoled when something doesn't go your way but you're not injured, such as a toddler falling on the floor when getting the hang of walking
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. Not even because he actually is, but because he is intense: he will put real effort into learning a lot of things, from English to skiing, dating to "politics").
And of course, the problem these parents and children have with the suicide ... 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. He needed to be acknowledged and rewarded for the effort he put in. But these days (not that it was much better before, but it was better), we demand any such effort be hidden and buried deeply (a lot of schools don't even give grades, at all, anymore).
For reasons that I cannot fathom we seem to think this will make people "more equal", when in reality, of course, it rewards being born in a powerful position in society, and focusing on ability rewards putting in effort. Certainly with the current availability of learning materials.
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.
No. They didn't like him because he attacked other children.
From the article:
"He could be charming, generous, and humane. But he could also turn suddenly violent. At my son’s seventh-birthday party, Trevor bit another boy on the ear so hard that the mark was still visible when that child next went to school. Trevor terrorized the smaller kids in the class, and, if they pushed back, he would try to get them in trouble. He was shrewd in his manipulations. In second grade, he tried extracting cash from other boys by threatening to spread embarrassing rumors."
"He pushed one child down some stairs; the mother asked the school to insure physical distance between the boys in the stairwell. Playing paintball, Trevor sneaked up behind a boy and fired close-range into his helmet; the child developed blurry vision. Another boy came home from school with red marks on his neck; the school told his mother that Trevor had choked him."
This long list of one-sided remarks with no explanation is typical of schools where teacher supervision is totally lacking. Of course they still see the explosion, no matter how bad the supervision. What they miss is the reason. They see how it ends, not the buildup towards it. And, of course, the buildup is the problem, not that a kid eventually loses control. Every kid and adult will eventually lose control, given enough stress.
That the kid was able to do so much damage is also an indication that oversight totally failed. Was there no warning sign before that helmet shot? really? Yes, of course there were. Many of them. They just totally missed everything. It isn't that nothing was happening in the class, it's just that shooting another kid in the face is the minimum threshold for getting to a teacher's attention that maybe some supervision is necessary. Then, of course, the teacher demands some extreme punishment and declares "everything went so fast". Everything went "so fast" while this teacher was looking at these kids for hours ... Either their ability to predict social interactions is worse than a dog's (unlikely), or the teacher was playing angry birds for hours at that point. The second factor also explains why the teacher demands extreme punishment: to hide that they're not supervising the kids.
[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.
Since we talk so much about personality choice and responsibly in the US: it's their decision to take that risk, not yours.
While the death rate was low, it was way, way, way higher than usual cause of death at this age.
Also think about it in another way: a disease which impairs 1 out of 5000 people is not considered "rare" by any health authorities. For people 20 to 40, the death rate of covid was between 1/500 and 1/1000.
And i have another point for more economically-minded people: people from age 0 to 25 cost money to society. People 25 to 55 are net positives, as they contribute much to the economy: they consume a lot, they build a lot, they have energy for associative tasks and for child rearing. They are perhaps the most productive members of society on an island. Then consider people 55+. They are less productive, on an island, but sometime they have so much experience that loosing one without warning can set a company or some research back a couple of year. Also, they consume a lot, so loosing a lot of this population suddenly would destroy any economy riding on internal consumption.
The last argument is probably why policymakers of countries not know to care much about their workers still reacted quite fast (maybe overreacted: i don't think so, but i understand pleople saying that).
They are a public health menace, and should be quarantined until they are no longer infectious.
> 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.”
Personally I would have chosen to focus on the nihilism of consumer materialism, starting with this poor child's list of empty "goals".