What is the youngest age at which a person is recorded to have committed suicide?
-FrL-
Hmm, interesting question - my first thought though is “Does intent have to be established?” Young children can be pretty oblivious to mortal danger and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that some poorly supervised young children have killed themselves quite by accident.
ETA: I just looked up suicide in the dictionary and was surprised to find that “taking one’s own life voluntarily and intentionally” is actually built into the definition. I always just thought of it as simply killing of oneself, and considered accidental but self-induced death to be suicide. Guess not. Carry on.
Right.Somewhere here is a long debate over whether animal can commit suicide, one sde taking the reasonable position that since animals can’t understand death, they aren’t really commiting suicide, just doing something that leads to their own death.
So, the same problem lies here. Clearly even newborns have done things that have killed them. But at what age is that act knowing and wilful? 18? Then 18 is the youngest age. 16? then 16 is the youngest age. And so on.
Sad, really.
This is the only story that I can remember (and find): Kids Imitate Saddam’s Televised Hanging Death.
It’s sad.
There was a 4 year old who appeared in a Hamas video promising to be a suicide bomber…
I remember reading a newspaper article a long time ago about a girl - maybe nine years old? - who committed suicide. My recollection is sketchy, but I think she deliberately stepped in the path of an oncoming train (or traffic) after talking about wanting to end her life because her mother was sick or dying or recently dead? I am thinking it was in the UK. Too hard to Google up anything with that incredible vague recollection.
298 youths age 10–14 (74% of them male) committed suicide in the U.S. in 1996.
A family friend who just retired from being an elementary school guidance counselor mentioned to us once that she had had a rough day because a first grader had attempted suicide. Of course, how well does a child that young understand permanence and death?
Something else though with attempting suicide is how do you know they didnt want to get caught? Or just wanted attention. I read somewhere that teenage girls “attempt” suicide twice as much as men, but there are still more male deaths because of the ways they each try. The person has to understand death in the way we do. My 4 year old cousin knows Bambi’s mom “died” but does she know what that means? She knows her aunt is “sick” (breast cancer) just like her mom was, and because of over hearing knows that she will probably “die” but how does she know what that means? I would say that a person has to be at least 8 for them to truely know what death is and commit suicide.
I remember attempting suicide at age 4. I would choke myself with my hands until (I guess) I would pass out (being so young, I didn’t realize that my hands would relax once I lost consciousness).
I knew what “dead” meant.
BTW, I’m much better now!
Why would you think that? If someone accidentally eats some poisonous berries that look like blueberries, and dies, would you really consider that suicide?
Yeah, that notion could not be more wrong.
It was worse than nine… http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9F0CEFDB1631F934A25755C0A965958260
Do any of us?
I don’t mean that just to be pithy. I mean that when I was myself suicidal, I just wanted the pain to stop. I wanted life to stop. I’m not sure how to articulate it, but it wasn’t death I was seeking but the cessation of life. I think some 4 year olds can grok that.
“grok”? 
grok (grk)
tr.v. grok·ked, grok·king, groks Slang
To understand profoundly through intuition or empathy.
[Coined by Robert A. Heinlein in his Stranger in a Strange Land.]
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2003. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
[grumble grumble kids these days don’t know the classics]
grok = understand in a visceral empathic way.
It’s a Martian word from Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. Very big back in the 60s and 70s.
Edit: beaten to the punch, I see. Should preview, I guess
Wow, nice Google-fu. That’s definitely the story I remember.
I was thinking the same thing myself. “Done because we are too menny”