For at least the past decade, suicide has been recognized as the second leading cause of death in American preteens and teenagers. It's critical that we understand just how big an issue this is immediately, instead of—gruesomely—trying to measure the size of the problem by documenting the numbers of completed suicides.
Because suicide attempts and suicidal ideation are predictors of a later completed suicide, however, analyzing increases in these markers can provide a measurable proxy of the extent of suicidality. A recent analysis of data from the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey sought to quantify just how much these markers have increased in children. The investigators examined emergency department (ED) evaluations for both suicide attempts and suicidal ideation in kids 5-18 years of age from a nationally representative sample of institutions.
Just under 5% of the almost 60,000 ED visits at participating hospitals during the 8 years of data collection were for a suicide attempt or suicidal ideation. The median age of these children was 13 years and the vast majority (97.9%) were not hospitalized.
Extrapolating these data to the entire nation, estimated annual ED visits for this indication almost doubled during the study period, rising from 580,000 in 2007 to 1.12 million in 2015. This compares to an increase in visits for all reasons of just under 20%.
