‘I wasn’t thinking about anything except wanting to hurt myself.’ Teen suicide attempts soar
Allison’s quinceañera was nothing like she had dreamt it to be as a child in Costa Rica. She was not in her home country surrounded by family. There were no special food or gifts. And she didn’t get to wear the purplish-blue and white chiffon gown she saw herself in.
“I had imagined a princess party with my family!” she said in Spanish. But instead, she spent the day at home caring for her siblings. “I was so stressed out that day,” the 11th-grader recalled. “It made me depressed.”
That Sunday, while cooking dinner for her two younger siblings while her parents were at work, she had to stop herself from cutting her arm with the kitchen knife. “I was so overwhelmed and wasn’t thinking about anything except wanting to hurt myself,” said Allison, who has considered ending her life on more than one occasion. She considered telling a friend, but that friend had a history of cutting her arms and legs, so she kept it to herself. JUMPING OFF SCHOOL BUILDINGS Allison is one of scores of students in South Florida struggling with mental health challenges, exacerbated by the pandemic’s disruption of their school routine. In recent weeks, students have jumped from buildings at two South Florida high schools. The first, a girl at Palmetto High School, survived after jumping from the third floor of a school building within the first week of school. Earlier this month, a senior at Fort Lauderdale High School jumped to his death.
Yet the Miami-Dade school district is not required by state law to keep track of suicides or attempted suicides of students. Instead, the school district tracks the number of risk assessments they complete. The assessment, conducted when students are deemed to be at risk of suicide, determines the level of risk for a student expressing suicidal thoughts or intent to commit suicide. Allison was never assessed for suicide, and her suicidal thoughts were never reported. Adolescent and child mental health has been declared a national state of emergency by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and the Children’s Hospital Association, as of last fall. And in 2020, among Americans ages 10-14 and 25-34, suicide was the second-leading cause of death, followed by unintentional injuries like car crashes or accidental overdose. “We have to ask people about their mental health routinely like any other vital sign, or we will not do our job in preventing the suicide crisis,” said Kelly Posner Gerstenhaber, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University and the lead scientist of the Columbia Protocol, the most widely used suicide assessment tool.
