At what age do you think it would be possible for a child to knowingly commit suicide?
There are two issues here: having the physical capability to commit suicide, and having the cognitive capacity to understand that you are committing suicide.
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Deputy State Medical Examiner Dr. Clifford Nelson says that 6-year-old Samantha Kuberski (a first-grader at Grandhaven Elementary School) committed suicide by hanging. Captain Dennis Marks of the detective division of McMinville (Oregon) calls it an accident. If it was suicide, Samantha would be the youngest person to ever commit suicide in Oregon. The state Department of Human Services (DHS) says that children younger than 5 years of age have been known to try to kill themsleves.
Samantha was found unconscious at her home. Her three sisters ahd her mother were in other parts of the house. Samantha had a child’s blanket and a corduroy belt wrapped around her neck.
The article also says that nationally (in the USA) there are documented cases of young children committing suicide, like a 6-year-old Florida girl who pushed her younger brother out of the path of a train and then deliberately stayed on the tracks (the girl had indicated to others that she wanted to die, to go to heaven so she could become an angel and be with her mother). Xun Chin of the DHS suicide prevention program says that from 1999 to 2006 there were 33 children under 10 who were reported as committing suicide in the USA.
Linfield College psychology professor Tanya Tompkins, who chairs the Yamhill County Suicide Prevention Coalition, says that it would be an incredibly rare event for Samantha to have committed suicide. Dr. Kirk Wolfe, a child and adolescent psychiatrist serving as chief medical consultant for Morrison Child and Family Services in Portland, agreed with Tompkins, saying that children of that age are not aware of what death actually is (he knows of a case of 4 1/2-year-old girl who overdosed on pills) - his professional opinion that you don’t understand the finality of death until you are in the 8-10 age range. Wolfe also says that you should watch out for signs of depression in young children, even a 6-year-old can sink into a depressed state.
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I’m not a child psychologist, but I would find it very difficult to believe that a six-year-old would have enough realization of the consequences of their actions to be able to call their death suicide. The case of the Florida girl does give me pause. In the case of Samantha Kuberski, I don’t think a six-year-old would even have the dexterity to hang themselves.
My niece started developing an awareness of death around age 4/5. I think I was 6/7 when I realized what it was and what it meant. I have no idea what suicidal urges are like if you are younger and do not comprehend the meaning of death.
As soon as you are truly aware of what death is, you are capable of suicide. I imagine that awareness varies from child to child. Young children are literally solipsists.
I know that my 7-year-old knows that people die, obviously, but I still can’t imagine him actually having the willpower (or whatever the right term is) to commit suicide.
My brother was writing about suicide at age 7. I don’t know how far he went in contemplating methods; he knew that death involved “never coming back” and that people whose loved ones had commited suicide felt sad (mentioned in his writings). He’s always been one of those people who go “from the highest peaks to the darkest valley”, emotionally, although not one of the most extreme cases. He also had good external reasons to be depressed.
I have always thought it was dangerous to go on and on about the wonders of Heaven to little children. Not every child has a happy life, and they can’t comprehend that these are not literal descriptions. If I have a miserable life, and if pulling this trigger allows me to walk through a magical door into a happier place, why on earth wouldn’t I do so?
I grew up in a remote rural culture where guns were literally and everyday subsistence tool. I knew at a very early age, pre-school, 4-5 perhaps, that guns were used to kill food and that improper use of guns could result in killing ones self. I don’t remember when I was introduce to the concept of suicide but about age 10-12 I started thinking about it a lot.
I can’t speak for other denominations, but when I was in Catholic Sunday School (around 10 y/o) they drove home the point very early on that you don’t get into heaven if you commit suicide. Probably for just this reason, “If heaven is so great and I’ve atoned for all my current sins, why not shove off now?” That was a long time ago though, no clue as to whether they still maintain this stand.
My niece went through a suicidal – or very close to it – phase when she was 8. Thankfully she went into counseling, into a new class at school, and got out of a church that wasn’t helping. By “suicidal” I mean she often expressed that she wished she was dead, and not in a melodramatic way, but sincerely. She’d write notes (which my sister found, leading to therapy etc.) about how she was going to kill herself. It was scary as fuck. I’m so grateful that she’s much happier now, 2 years later.
Of course, you also have to consider what children learn from external sources; not the same message an adult would get. Even a passing mention that “X committed suicide by hanging themselves” may make an impressionable child aware that that technique exists and can have to the appropriate effect. What would trigger them to try it? Depression, guilt, fright, curiosity, anger (“I’ll show them! They’ll be sorry!”)? Who knows?
Whether they understand that they cannot change their mind and make it right again is irrelevant once they succeed. Kids can do or think the weirdest things because they misunderstood what people are talking about.
Where I live (north of Dallas, in Texas), we recently had a 9 year old hang himself. The cause was purportedly bullying. So I’d agree that there are children at least that young.
Also remember that suicide is very often not done to escape some real world troubles. Very often it is anger directed toward someone else. Suicide is selfish, mean, and since the person doing it has no sense of the worth of their own life, weighs the effect on others far more than you might find reasonable.
None of those characteristics are beyond a young child’s personal understanding. Teach them they are worthless, teach them that they can expect more of the same, and let them learn how death affects others, bingo. Whether they believe in the permanence of death is a curious legal argument, it generally fails to convince an oncoming train.
Suicide is still suicide, even if the person committing it doesn’t have a “deep” understanding of what death means.
A propos to nothing, Slate had an interesting Explainer article on child suicide a while ago. It’s worth a read. It does say that younger children tend to commit suicide for different reasons than adolescents, and the act tends to be much more impulsive. It also points out that it often is difficult to identify child suicide, because the manner of death is more likely to resemble an accident (e.g. running into traffic.)
My 8 year old son is doing some things like that now. He keeps getting into trouble at school for behavior/attention seeking issues, and when confronted by myself or my wife about it, he’ll often say something like “I’m not meant for this world, I don’t belong here” or something similar. Its pretty disconcerting.
We’re getting him into counselling. He gets good grades and has a relatively happy home life, so I don’t know where he’s getting it from. We don’t physically punish him, but we do ground him from things he likes to do and games, toys, etc he likes to play with.
May I ask you to elaborate on your statement that children are solipsists? Children do have confirmable sensory inputs from the outside world, and they also act on the world through neural fibers running from brain to muscles. Are those facts not enough to make solipsism the wrong description?
For a long time it was a truism in the psychiatric community that young children did not suffer from depression. This is no longer considered true. Sometimes depression in children can look like depression in adults, and sometimes it can look like hostility with no cause, so often depressed children don’t get “caught,” because they are not weepy and moody; they are difficult, often obstinate. They get extra discipline, and not sympathy, with just contributes to their picture of themselves as “bad,” since they see other children having a much easier time of things then they have.
Sometimes they are subject to bullying when other children pick up on the fact that these particular children get more discipline than average, and teachers often don’t step in, because they hope peer pressure will correct the child’s behavior. The teacher only sees a superficial picture of what is happening, and doesn’t see how deep the bullying goes.