![]() “If housing is unstable, if there is food instability, that all contributes to anxiety and stress, even for students as young as I have,” said Carter, the Missouri school counselor. ![]() Poverty has an impact too, experts said, as the percentage of children eligible for free or reduced-price lunch jumped to 52 percent from 38 percent over the past two decades. “I see more kids looking sicker, earlier.”įor children of immigrant families, one clinician noted the toll of changes to immigration policy in recent years a 2018 study based on interviews with more than 200 Latino parents found both adults and children in their families had higher levels of anxiety due to fears of deportation and anti-immigrant rhetoric. “I see kids where multigenerational drug abuse, mental health issues and poverty have all worked together to create several generations of really, really unwell people,” said Lori Chaffin-Britt, intensive treatment programs director at The Child Center, a mental health agency in western Oregon where staff members have noticed more behavioral problems in children as young as 5. (Full data isn’t yet available for 2020, but in the first three quarters of the year, there were 3,503 such visits.) Visits for teenagers with suicidal thoughts or self-harm at these hospitals also rose from 2016 to 2019, but at a slower rate - by 44 percent, compared to 115 percent for younger children.Īt The Children’s Center, a youth mental health clinic for children 8 and younger in Salt Lake City, the “phones have not stopped ringing” with families seeking care, CEO Rebecca Dutson said.Īt the Riverbend Center for Mental Health, which works with several school districts in northwest Alabama, staff members documented a 55 percent increase from 2018 to 2019 in safety plans for children ages 6-13 who were at risk of hurting themselves.Īnd at the Children’s Minnesota hospital system, even as the volume of patients declined during the coronavirus pandemic, the number seeking care for mental health stayed consistent. The association documented 5,485 emergency room or inpatient visits for suicidal thoughts and self-harm among 6- to-12-year-olds at these hospitals in 2019, up from 2,555 in 2016. The number of children ages 6-12 who visited children’s hospitals for suicidal thoughts or self-harm has more than doubled since 2016, according to data from 46 such facilities across the country collected for NBC News by the Children’s Hospital Association, a trade organization. And suicides among children 10 and younger remain rare, with 29 reported in 2019, according to the CDC.īut in interviews, more than a dozen mental health professionals, including school counselors, social workers, psychiatrists and suicidologists, said they are seeing more children as young as kindergarten who are in dire need of support. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does not include elementary or middle school students in its biannual youth survey of risky behaviors. There is limited data about these younger age groups. "No matter how young they are, we take it very seriously" when students express the desire to kill themselves, said elementary school counselor Olivia Carter. While suicidal thoughts and self-harm have been well documented in teenagers, mental health experts say too little attention has been paid to young children, despite growing evidence that more elementary and middle school students are in crisis. But I would say a good number of kids understand what it means to end their life by suicide.” “Those existential conversations are very difficult at this level. “Some of them will ask, ‘What does it mean to die? What happens when you die?’” Carter said. Now, she says, about one student a month at her pre-K through fifth grade school tells her that they want to die. Her first year, she only had to use it once or twice. When Carter started working at Jefferson Elementary in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, in 2016, there was a school suicide protocol in place to ensure that students who expressed a desire to hurt themselves got the help they needed.
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