A 9-year-old. I’m distraught.
Pathogue-Medford is a district in eastern Long Island.
I received a number of calls & emails yesterday when this news broke. My heart sank. You think of yourself as a 9-year-old & you try to remember what was going thru your brain at that time – & question: would I have been “capable” of this, at that age.
And here’s the problem – though our minds go “there,” I don’t think “capable” is the right word – at ALL. It implies, as is all too often the case, in this space, that this young boy was planning & plotting an escape. I will hold to the idea that while that may be how suicides happen in some cases (w a plan) they happen far more frequently in an impulsive way/error messages.
Repeating from an old post, but in the most recent Harvard Behavioral Health study on the topic: 87% of those who’d attempted suicide said that they’d only had the ideation w/in 24 hrs of the attempt. 78% w/in an hr, 25% w/in 5 min of the attempt.
Thinking back to when I was 9, the beginnings of the trauma I was abt to face had just begun. My brother had broken his femur bone one summer, was in traction, in a body cast, & home schooled for a yr. The next summer he was diagnosed w ALL, a children’s form of Leukemia (a scary diagnosis in the late 80s).
Bc of that I was faced w so many “what if” questions as I saw him lose his hair, coloring, muscle tone. Those what ifs are traumatic. They beat you up.
We don’t know what this young boy was facing personally. But we do know he was living in 2022, w iPads, cell phones, comparisons, coming off a p@ndemlc, watching war happen w visuals we never used to be privy to. Those factors, combined w anything he was struggling w personally – they dysregulate a nervous system.
When that happens, suicidal ideations CAN occur & at that young age, overpower rationality. It’s why we gotta stop only advocating for “screening for anxiety/depression,” & start to screen for & educate arnd behaviors/feelings/burnout/fatigue.
We are NOT labels. We are humans – we suffer at diff rates at diff times in our lives. Let’s be open to looking out for each other at ANY age. This is a crisis.