17 ms·

The mystifying rise of child suicide

51 points by IdEntities 5y ago

Overtonwindow 5y ago
The article goes out of its way to avoid discussing the damage the pandemic and the lockdowns did to children. We will reap that mistake for a long time.
- travisathougies 5y ago
  Exactly, I remember distinctly at age 16 thinking my life was going to be ruined because my parents wouldn't let me 'party' [1] during high school. Children have neither perspectitve nor sense, nor should they be expected to be. The truth is two years of little socialization and stimulation may be okay for mentally well adults, but it is criminal to impose that on children [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.
  - saila 5y ago
    It would be criminal to allow children to rampantly spread COVID too, even if they themselves were/are at low risk. Imagine the damage when a child brings home COVID and one of their parents ends up dying or even "just" disabled with long COVID. There's no simple answer here.
    - travisathougies 5y ago
      Parents of a normal age (which these seem to be) are extremely unlikely to die from COVID. This is just fear mongering.
      - jmcgough 5y ago
        In the 20-44 age range, 1/500 - 1/1000 die. In 45-54 it's 1/100 - 1/200. And that's ignoring long-term complications from the disease. The numbers are a lot better now that vaccination is common, but how many people would roll that die if they don't need to? Since we talk so much about personality choice and responsibly in the US: it's their decision to take that risk, not yours.
      - orwin 5y ago
        Actually... 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).
    - pmoriarty 5y ago
      It's not just their parents who are at risk from a COVID-infected child, but also grandparents, teachers, and the parents and grandparents of other children who this child might infect. They are a public health menace, and should be quarantined until they are no longer infectious.
- mikeyouse 5y ago
  It explicitly mentions it several times.. did we read the same article? > 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.”
- saila 5y ago
  "Although it is too early to quantify fully the long-term impact of the pandemic, it has exacerbated the burgeoning crisis..."
- gdulli 5y ago
  Focusing on covid would have completely misdirected from the important point that this trend has been in place for decades. I know the comments section is everyone's chance to project their personal covid grievance on whatever they're reading. But if you truly take this issue seriously you should be interested in its actual causes, which clearly predate covid. If you'd rather weaponize the cause in service of partisan nudging of the line on public health policy back and forth around the middle, go ahead I guess.
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    It would have been intellectually dishonest because actual youth suicides were not up in 2020 compared to 2019, were down considerably from 2018, and among the focus of this article, urban youth in New York, were in fact way way down, by over 50%. Personally I would have chosen to focus on the nihilism of consumer materialism, starting with this poor child's list of empty "goals".
travisathougies 5y ago
It's sad but when I read about children who are 'precocious', I think either their parents are driving them too hard, or (because of the example of a 4th grade boy bringing a girl to a school event...) there's been some sexual / emotional abuse [1]. None of what is being described here is normal childhood behavior, which makes sense, since the family is not at all normal. Both parents are hotshot career-focused individuals. It begs the question if the kids ever had time to just be kids. As I've discovered over the years going from a 'work hard, play hard' youth to a more mellow adult, is that balance is the key, and most people today simply lack it, and these parents sure sound like it. 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.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  Just because a family doesn't want hundreds of acquaintances visiting their home does not imply that their children were unable to see their friends. Many families throughout the COVID era have adopted the stable cohort, where the people in that cohort freely intermix, but limit interactions and take precautions with outsiders.
scarmig 5y ago
Oddly, the article doesn't mention anything about gender roles or the disproportionate impact of suicide on young boys, even though they commit suicide at 4x the rate of young girls[0]. This is especially odd because the author of the article does feel comfortable discussing other demographic trends, like elevated rates among LGBT and non-white youth, even though those trends are much smaller in magnitude than that of boys compared to girls. [0] https://www.kidsdata.org/topic/210/suicides-gender/table https://www.kidsdata.org/topic/210/suicides-gender/table
- cultofmetatron 5y ago
  - dang 5y ago
    Please point it out without taking HN threads further into flamewar. That doesn't do anybody any good. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - cultofmetatron 5y ago
      - dang 5y ago
        "No one gives a shit about young boys" is not a fact. That's flamewar rhetoric. I realize that you're expressing a feeling there and I'm sure the feeling is a good and well-intentioned one, but the problem is that inflammatory rhetoric like that, on the internet, just runs into other people's intense feelings and blows up. Then we get a dumb and nasty thread instead of a thoughtful curious one. There are much better ways to express your concerns that don't break the HN guidelines. I'm just asking you to use one of those ways, instead of this way. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        5y ago
thr0wawayf00 5y ago
I've struggled with suicidal thoughts throughout my entire life, as far back as I can remember. Both of my parents struggle with untreated mental illness that had a major impact on my upbringing. They were often very emotionally abusive and sometime physically abusive throughout my childhood. There was no such thing as positive reinforcement in our household, we lived our childhoods just trying not be punished and it was at times very difficult. When I went through a divorce in my early 30's, I called my mom to break the news and she responded by screaming at the top of her lungs at me. She would later tell me that she was trying to scare me into making sure that I had made the right decision. That night was closest I had come to crossing the rubicon in many years. I still don't fully understand how a mother could talk their child this way in such a difficult moment, but such is life. 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.
- Barrera 5y ago
  > ... When I went through a divorce in my early 30's, I called my mom to break the news and she responded by screaming at the top of her lungs at me. She would later tell me that she was trying to scare me into making sure that I had made the right decision. That night was closest I had come to crossing the rubicon in many years. I still don't fully understand how a mother could talk their child this way in such a difficult moment, but such is life. Then Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents may offer some insight [1]. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23129659-adult-children-of-emotionally-immature-parents https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23129659-adult-children-...
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  "Strangely, one of most impactful moments towards reducing my recurring suicidal thoughts involved magic mushrooms." 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).
dang 5y ago
http://web.archive.org/web/20220404223206/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/04/11/the-mystifying-rise-of-child-suicide http://web.archive.org/web/20220404223206/https://www.newyor... https://archive.ph/NIRCs https://archive.ph/NIRCs
WalterBright 5y ago
My hypothesis, unencumbered with any evidence, is that modern society and parents have gotten very good at shielding small children from adversity and failure of any sort. 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.
- goat_whisperer 5y ago
- ausbah 5y ago
  amazing how people can be so bold as to share their uninformed opinion even when they acknowledge it's uninformed
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    The search for explanations always starts with a hypothesis. I find it funny you call me out for being honest.
  - garbagetime 5y ago
    How is it bold to discuss stuff in the discussion section of a website?
  - adamredwoods 5y ago
    The knee-jerk reaction is to blame the parents.
- RosanaAnaDana 5y ago
  Another hypothesis not bothering with evidence, is that due to increased media, mass media, and internet media exposure, we lack a 'quasi-local' version of what success can look like in a meaningful way. 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.
candiodari 5y ago
Strange how little attention is given to the perspective of Trevor: 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.
renewiltord 5y ago
> 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. 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.
- 0xdeadb00f 5y ago
  7 year old kids bite other kids all the time... I know for sure I did as a 7 yr old.
  - renewiltord 5y ago
    Yeah, certainly a bit overplayed here, right?
Overtonwindow 5y ago
The damage done to children due to masks and lockdowns will be reckoned with for a generation.
- 0xdeadb00f 5y ago
  Lockdowns probably but I fail to see why masks would cause such issues if countries like China and Japan were wearing them relatively often before the pandemic.
shruubi 5y ago
The whole story of Trevor is just heartbreaking to me. I see a lot of my experiences helping someone get proper mental health care in this story, and the fact that between the restrictions that COVID created and how ill-equiped the mental health sector is unless you send someone to a hospital is awful. 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.
civilized 5y ago
I'm going to make a provocative suggestion. The only thing these parents did wrong was limiting Trevor's Fortnite time. 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.
- JCharante 5y ago
  Agreed, video games got me into adulthood. And I didn't turn into an addict and I picked up some valuable skills from it.
- Gigachad 5y ago
  When I was young I had a period of depression for no real reason. The thing that helped me most was binge watching Myth-busters. Like hours at a time. Thankfully I was feeling better before I made it to the end of the series. While watching it I’d feel much better and usually feel better after as well.
lifeplusplus 5y ago
Possible correlation with rise in atheism

51 points by IdEntities 5y ago

The article goes out of its way to avoid discussing the damage the pandemic and the lockdowns did to children. We will reap that mistake for a long time.

travisathougies 5y ago
Exactly, I remember distinctly at age 16 thinking my life was going to be ruined because my parents wouldn't let me 'party' [1] during high school. Children have neither perspectitve nor sense, nor should they be expected to be. The truth is two years of little socialization and stimulation may be okay for mentally well adults, but it is criminal to impose that on children [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.
- saila 5y ago
  It would be criminal to allow children to rampantly spread COVID too, even if they themselves were/are at low risk. Imagine the damage when a child brings home COVID and one of their parents ends up dying or even "just" disabled with long COVID. There's no simple answer here.
  - travisathougies 5y ago
    Parents of a normal age (which these seem to be) are extremely unlikely to die from COVID. This is just fear mongering.
    - jmcgough 5y ago
      In the 20-44 age range, 1/500 - 1/1000 die. In 45-54 it's 1/100 - 1/200. And that's ignoring long-term complications from the disease. The numbers are a lot better now that vaccination is common, but how many people would roll that die if they don't need to? Since we talk so much about personality choice and responsibly in the US: it's their decision to take that risk, not yours.
    - orwin 5y ago
      Actually... 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).
  - pmoriarty 5y ago
    It's not just their parents who are at risk from a COVID-infected child, but also grandparents, teachers, and the parents and grandparents of other children who this child might infect. They are a public health menace, and should be quarantined until they are no longer infectious.
mikeyouse 5y ago
It explicitly mentions it several times.. did we read the same article? > 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.”
saila 5y ago
"Although it is too early to quantify fully the long-term impact of the pandemic, it has exacerbated the burgeoning crisis..."
gdulli 5y ago
Focusing on covid would have completely misdirected from the important point that this trend has been in place for decades. I know the comments section is everyone's chance to project their personal covid grievance on whatever they're reading. But if you truly take this issue seriously you should be interested in its actual causes, which clearly predate covid. If you'd rather weaponize the cause in service of partisan nudging of the line on public health policy back and forth around the middle, go ahead I guess.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  It would have been intellectually dishonest because actual youth suicides were not up in 2020 compared to 2019, were down considerably from 2018, and among the focus of this article, urban youth in New York, were in fact way way down, by over 50%. Personally I would have chosen to focus on the nihilism of consumer materialism, starting with this poor child's list of empty "goals".

travisathougies 5y ago

It's sad but when I read about children who are 'precocious', I think either their parents are driving them too hard, or (because of the example of a 4th grade boy bringing a girl to a school event...) there's been some sexual / emotional abuse [1]. None of what is being described here is normal childhood behavior, which makes sense, since the family is not at all normal. Both parents are hotshot career-focused individuals. It begs the question if the kids ever had time to just be kids. As I've discovered over the years going from a 'work hard, play hard' youth to a more mellow adult, is that balance is the key, and most people today simply lack it, and these parents sure sound like it. 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.

jeffbee 5y ago
Just because a family doesn't want hundreds of acquaintances visiting their home does not imply that their children were unable to see their friends. Many families throughout the COVID era have adopted the stable cohort, where the people in that cohort freely intermix, but limit interactions and take precautions with outsiders.

scarmig 5y ago

Oddly, the article doesn't mention anything about gender roles or the disproportionate impact of suicide on young boys, even though they commit suicide at 4x the rate of young girls[0]. This is especially odd because the author of the article does feel comfortable discussing other demographic trends, like elevated rates among LGBT and non-white youth, even though those trends are much smaller in magnitude than that of boys compared to girls. [0] https://www.kidsdata.org/topic/210/suicides-gender/table https://www.kidsdata.org/topic/210/suicides-gender/table

cultofmetatron 5y ago
- dang 5y ago
  Please point it out without taking HN threads further into flamewar. That doesn't do anybody any good. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - cultofmetatron 5y ago
    - dang 5y ago
      "No one gives a shit about young boys" is not a fact. That's flamewar rhetoric. I realize that you're expressing a feeling there and I'm sure the feeling is a good and well-intentioned one, but the problem is that inflammatory rhetoric like that, on the internet, just runs into other people's intense feelings and blows up. Then we get a dumb and nasty thread instead of a thoughtful curious one. There are much better ways to express your concerns that don't break the HN guidelines. I'm just asking you to use one of those ways, instead of this way. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - 5y ago

thr0wawayf00 5y ago

I've struggled with suicidal thoughts throughout my entire life, as far back as I can remember. Both of my parents struggle with untreated mental illness that had a major impact on my upbringing. They were often very emotionally abusive and sometime physically abusive throughout my childhood. There was no such thing as positive reinforcement in our household, we lived our childhoods just trying not be punished and it was at times very difficult. When I went through a divorce in my early 30's, I called my mom to break the news and she responded by screaming at the top of her lungs at me. She would later tell me that she was trying to scare me into making sure that I had made the right decision. That night was closest I had come to crossing the rubicon in many years. I still don't fully understand how a mother could talk their child this way in such a difficult moment, but such is life. 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.

Barrera 5y ago
> ... When I went through a divorce in my early 30's, I called my mom to break the news and she responded by screaming at the top of her lungs at me. She would later tell me that she was trying to scare me into making sure that I had made the right decision. That night was closest I had come to crossing the rubicon in many years. I still don't fully understand how a mother could talk their child this way in such a difficult moment, but such is life. Then Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents may offer some insight [1]. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23129659-adult-children-of-emotionally-immature-parents https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23129659-adult-children-...
pmoriarty 5y ago
"Strangely, one of most impactful moments towards reducing my recurring suicidal thoughts involved magic mushrooms." 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).

dang 5y ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20220404223206/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/04/11/the-mystifying-rise-of-child-suicide http://web.archive.org/web/20220404223206/https://www.newyor... https://archive.ph/NIRCs https://archive.ph/NIRCs

WalterBright 5y ago

My hypothesis, unencumbered with any evidence, is that modern society and parents have gotten very good at shielding small children from adversity and failure of any sort. 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.

goat_whisperer 5y ago
ausbah 5y ago
amazing how people can be so bold as to share their uninformed opinion even when they acknowledge it's uninformed
- WalterBright 5y ago
  The search for explanations always starts with a hypothesis. I find it funny you call me out for being honest.
- garbagetime 5y ago
  How is it bold to discuss stuff in the discussion section of a website?
- adamredwoods 5y ago
  The knee-jerk reaction is to blame the parents.
RosanaAnaDana 5y ago
Another hypothesis not bothering with evidence, is that due to increased media, mass media, and internet media exposure, we lack a 'quasi-local' version of what success can look like in a meaningful way. 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.

candiodari 5y ago

Strange how little attention is given to the perspective of Trevor: 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.

renewiltord 5y ago

> 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. 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.

0xdeadb00f 5y ago
7 year old kids bite other kids all the time... I know for sure I did as a 7 yr old.
- renewiltord 5y ago
  Yeah, certainly a bit overplayed here, right?

Overtonwindow 5y ago

The damage done to children due to masks and lockdowns will be reckoned with for a generation.

0xdeadb00f 5y ago
Lockdowns probably but I fail to see why masks would cause such issues if countries like China and Japan were wearing them relatively often before the pandemic.

shruubi 5y ago

The whole story of Trevor is just heartbreaking to me. I see a lot of my experiences helping someone get proper mental health care in this story, and the fact that between the restrictions that COVID created and how ill-equiped the mental health sector is unless you send someone to a hospital is awful. 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.

civilized 5y ago

I'm going to make a provocative suggestion. The only thing these parents did wrong was limiting Trevor's Fortnite time. 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.

JCharante 5y ago
Agreed, video games got me into adulthood. And I didn't turn into an addict and I picked up some valuable skills from it.
Gigachad 5y ago
When I was young I had a period of depression for no real reason. The thing that helped me most was binge watching Myth-busters. Like hours at a time. Thankfully I was feeling better before I made it to the end of the series. While watching it I’d feel much better and usually feel better after as well.

lifeplusplus 5y ago

Possible correlation with rise in atheism