Suicides rising among kids ages 8 to 12, especially in girls

The kids are not alright.

New data shows a troubling 8% annual increase in the number of American children ages 8 to 12 who died by suicide, with the sharpest increase seen among girls.

Suicide has now become the fifth leading cause of death among both male and female preteens, report a team led by Donna Ruch , of Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.

Ruch works at the hospital's Center for Suicide Prevention and Research. Her team published its findings Tuesday in the journal JAMA Network Open .

Rising rates of suicides among children have set off alarm bells for experts in recent years.

"In 2021, the National Institute of Mental Health convened a research roundtable series to address the rising rates of suicides in preteens, defined as youths aged 8 to 12 years," Ruch's group noted.

They said that, until now, there's been little good data on suicides among preteens.

To help remedy that, the Ohio group looked at data for 2001 through 2022 from a major federal online database that lists the underlying cause of death for U.S. preteens.

Overall, 2,241 preteens are known to have died by suicide during the more than two decades covered by the database.

Initially, there was a encouraging downward trend in these deaths between 2001 and 2007, Ruch's group noted.

However, beginning in 2008, that trend reversed.

Each year after 2007, there's been an 8.2% annual increase in preteen suicide cases.

Preteen suicide is still exceedingly rare: Between 2001 and 2007, there were 3.3 such cases per 1 million population, Ruch's team noted.

By 2022, that number had risen to 5.7 per million, however.

In sheer numbers, preteen boys are still more likely to die by suicide compared to girls, with almost double the number of deaths.

But the rate at which young girls die by suicide is rising, more than tripling over the study time period. This trend reveals "a narrowing of the historically large gap in youth suicide rates between sexes," the researchers noted.

Whereas suicide was the 11th leading cause of death for preteen girls in 2007, by 2022 it became the 5th leading cause -- similar to boys.

Other groups with dramatically high increases in preteen suicides included Hispanics and American Indians/Pacific Islanders, the study showed.

Still, Black preteens remained most likely to die by suicide compared to Whites or other minorities.

The way in which preteens are dying from suicide is also changing: The rate at which firearms played a role more than doubled over the study period.

According to Ruch and colleagues, all of this underlines "the need for culturally informed... prevention efforts" that are tailored to help kids at whatever age or stage of development they might be in.

The Ohio study was published alongside another, related report on youth suicide in JAMA Network Open .

That study, led by Dr. Jennifer Hoffman , an emergency medicine physician with the Children's Hospital of Chicago, found that 3 of 5 U.S. young people who die by suicide don't have any prior mental health diagnosis.

Males, children younger than 14 and young people from minority or ethnic groups were the most likely to commit suicide without any prior mental health diagnosis, the data showed.

"Our findings point to the critical need to increase equitable access to mental health screening, diagnosis and treatment for all youth," Hoffmam said.

If you or someone you know is experiencing a mental health crisis, expert, confidential advice is available 24/7 on the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline .

More information

Learn the warning signs of suicide at the National Institute of Mental Health .

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