Children in Peril

The 20-year-old attempted suicide when she was 13 after years of dealing with depression, anxiety and an eating disorder. She says her recovery has highs and lows, but she’s stable now — enough so that she is a junior board member with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and is majoring in psychology.

“I guess that pain turned into passion,” Kelsey said.

Kelsey is part of an intensified effort to stem the rising number of youth suicides in Arkansas.

The number of suicides by minors in Arkansas jumped from 10 in 2010 to 27 in 2017, according to recent federal mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nationally, the trend is similar among other age groups.

Suicide became the second-leading cause of death in people ages 15 to 24 nationally in 2017, according to the CDC. Automobile crashes are the leading cause.

The numbers have increased as well for children ages 10-14, according to the CDC.

Experts who work in suicide prevention, research and mental health advocacy weren’t able to identify the reason behind the trend. There are many possible explanations and more research is needed, particularly for the younger population, they said.

“In the suicide prevention field, we’re all grappling with why is it just this sudden — in the last couple of years, we’ve just seen this huge increase. And I don’t think we really have a grasp on suicide specifically other than there are a lot of factors,” said Hope Mullins, the assistant director of the Injury Prevention Center at Arkansas Children’s Hospital.

From 2012 to 2017, at least one child in most Arkansas counties died by suicide, according to an analysis of data compiled by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette from available public records.

The oldest was just a few months away from his 18th birthday, and the youngest was about to turn 6, the newspaper’s data shows.

This story is one of an occasional series about what the newspaper’s data shows regarding child fatalities in Arkansas. A previous article examined child deaths from guns. Others will look into suffocation and other unnatural, often preventable causes of child fatalities.

Documents gathered by the newspaper show 63 reports of suicide — 21 by girls and 42 by boys — in the 2012-2017 period.

Arkansas children who died by suicide from 2012-2017

All deaths By year By age

All but 13 were teenagers.

Some death reports obtained through the state’s public records law listed histories of mental health problems or major life changes such as breakups, deaths in their families or sudden moves in the children’s lives. Others listed no such history.

But the reports used by the newspaper are incomplete, as shown when comparing the Democrat-Gazette’s database with federal mortality data.

Federal data shows that 119 children died by suicide in Arkansas from 2012 to 2017, an average rate of 2.8 per 100,000 children. Arkansas’ rate ranked 13th in the nation during that period, the most recent for which data was available as this article was being reported.

While many death reports used in the newspaper’s analysis lacked information on race, CDC data shows that 104 white children died by suicide in Arkansas from 2012-2017. Fourteen black children died by suicide in the same time period.

The CDC’s 2018 death statistics, which came too late to be included in the Democrat-Gazette’s analysis, show that 19 children in Arkansas died by suicide that year, a rate of 2.7 per 100,000.

The CDC collects its mortality data from state vital statistics offices, which use official death records. Those records are not public in Arkansas, as they are in some other states.

The Democrat-Gazette relied on coroners’ death reports, which are public record, as well as archived news articles, Arkansas Department of Human Services records and police reports to compile its database on the causes of child deaths from 2012 to 2017.

Some coroners contacted by the newspaper said they didn’t have records for every year requested because their predecessors had taken records home with them when they left office. And not all county coroners keep uniform records.

Regardless, increased suicides among young people have spurred stronger prevention efforts throughout the state, including educating Arkansans and working to remove stigmas surrounding mental health.

“One suicide is too many suicides,” said Mary Meacham, the chair of education and prevention for the Arkansas chapter of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

Rates of suicide by minors in Arkansas and neighboring states, 2008-2018

No one cause

“This little girl is really sad,” Ladeana thought to herself.

Ladeana, a licensed therapist with a private practice, knew how to get help for her daughter. She’d bring up the idea of therapy, but at first Kelsey was resistant.

“Sometimes I wonder if I should have pushed harder,” Ladeana said in a February interview.

Kelsey started therapy when she was 11. She said it made it difficult to foster relationships with her peers; she didn’t want to tell anyone that she was going to therapy.

There wasn’t one particular reason that she attempted suicide two years after starting therapy, she said. She’d gotten into a fight with a friend that day, but her problems went well beyond that.

Her eating disorder wasn’t getting better, and she said she wasn’t engaging with her therapy. Her depression, she said, manifested itself as anger much of the time.

“It was just things piling up,” Kelsey said. “I just knew I didn’t want to be alive anymore.”