Children Who Want toDie

Their suicide attempts and depressions concern researchers

An eight-year-old boy tried to hang himself, and failed only because he could not tie a good enough knot. A nine-year-old girl attempted suicide twice--her mother saved her once by yanking away a bottle of rubbing alcohol she was trying to drink, the next time by grabbing her after she had swung one leg over an eighth-floor balcony. Other young children have tried to die by setting fires in their homes, jumping off rooftops, taking fistfuls of pills and slashing their wrists.

Actual suicides by children under 14 are still rare; fewer than 200 a year occur in the U.S. But investigators are finding that attempted suicides and deep depression are unexpectedly common among emotionally disturbed youngsters. Psychiatrist Joaquim Puig-Antich of Columbia University, who has conducted a pilot study in this little-explored area, estimates that perhaps one out of every 200 American prepubertal children is despondent enough to think of suicide. Of the 50 depressed children he has treated over the past three years, 70% had suicidal thoughts and about a third had tried to kill themselves.

From questionnaires filled out in public school classes in Toronto, University of Pittsburgh Psychologist Maria Kovacs found that 41% of the 127 children surveyed admitted having thought about suicide. A similar study conducted in Philadelphia suggests a comparable figure. Another study at U.C.L.A.'s Neuropsychiatric Institute concluded that 5% of the 662 preadolescent children treated there over a four-year period were seriously self-destructive or suicidal. Morris Paulson, the clinical psychologist who conducted the U.C.L.A. study, found a common denominator among these disturbed youngsters: "Every one of them had a home that wasn't providing the understanding and caring that the child needed."

Neither race nor family income appears to be a relevant factor in the emergence of suicidal tendencies. But Paulson notes that many of the children come from families where "there tends to be a concept of guilt induced as a means of controlling the child's behavior." For such troubled kids, adds U.C.L.A. Child Psychiatrist Gabrielle Carlson, suicide is not just a way of escaping problems; the child often blames himself for family troubles and comes to believe that he deserves to die.

According to the investigators, girls try suicide as often as boys, but troubled males are usually easier to spot because of erratic behavior like temper tantrums, violent acts and running away from home. Girls, on the other hand, usually hide deep depression behind psychosomatic symptoms: headaches, nervous quirks and excessive weight gains or losses. Both sexes exhibit such warning signs as dramatic changes in school performance, insomnia, irritability and a tendency to be involved in mishaps. Says Paulson: "Serious accidents happening to any child over six require a social evaluation of the family to see if there are family stresses provoking a child to drink poison or run into traffic."

Puig-Antich has also been studying the families of suicidal children. He has found that half of all relatives, going back to grandparents, are either alcoholics or depressives. Such familial patterns have led some researchers to wonder whether there may be a genetic factor in the kind of depression that sometimes leads to suicide. "My hypothesis is that there is one," says Puig-Antich. Yet like other scientists, he concedes that the tendency of depression to run in families may only mean that distraught parents often pass on their troubles to their children. Whatever the cause of the suicidal drive, experts agree that kids can be as vulnerable as adults. Says Carlson: "If an adult has the bad feeling that his life is not worth living, and he has the means to end it, there's no reason why an eleven-year-old can't do it too." qed

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.