Child suicide

This morning, my Apple newsfeed included a Washington Post story about child suicide, centered on a ten-year-old girl who was happy and "dancing" the evening before the self-inflicted gunshot. A couple hours later when I looked for the article again, it was gone. Nor could I find it by google search. Apple or WaPo had disappeared it. This seems understandable to me: What could be as grotesque as ten-year-olds and younger killing themselves, or as helpless as adults' response to it? To me, the matter is so calamitously insane that I can't not think about it, even though I have never worked with or personally known a pre-teen who attempted or completed suicide.

In addition to the happiness and angelic generosity these children are usually reported to show prior to their death, there is the ubiquitous meme of the parents' cluelessness up until the final moment. A secondary meme is the parents' ex post facto crusade to research child (and adolescent) suicide, to join in tragedy and furrowed brow with other suicide parents, and to write big articles which are nothing but empty, ingenuous question marks.

But we should be able to imagine what is going on in a little child who cannot stand life. She is hiding a terrible secret, a terrible feeling, from her parents. She cannot lean on them. Nothing has mitigated her trauma horizon. This is similar, or identical, to the "foreshortened sense of one's future," a symptom of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder where after a life-changing trauma, the person cannot even picture a future for herself. How could that happen, where child abuse or parents' mutual enmity or bullying or ostracism at school could be the final factor, or the eternal factor, in her psyche? It is assumed that babies exist timeless: A feeling of joy or rage or fear contains no awareness of difference, of moderation or ending, of "this too shall pass." (This is understood to also be a quality of Borderline Personality Disorder: the infant's ego states in the adult.) But what could keep a child in second or third or fourth grade in that infant blindness of timelessness, of endlessness? What was happening, or not happening, all through her years that kept her locked in the starting gate?

There is, possibly, the "known unknown" of birth and pre-birth trauma. I vaguely remember old literature that tried to relate a twin's death in utero to the surviving neonate's baseline depression. And there was the Lancet (British medical journal) study (which I've referenced several times in this blog) causally relating respiratory trauma at birth to successful adolescent suicide. Maybe these exotic circumstances take care of all later suicide -- child to geriatric. But this is doubtful. The Washington Post article mentioned, as a given, child abuse and parents' fighting among obvious factors of a child's depression.

I believe the most realistic and fair assessment is that parents are responsible but not always blameworthy. There is no moral law that says parents should be able to, and therefore be required to, see beyond their own pain and rage that came from their childhood. There may be nothing in their psyche or in the outer world that can break through their self-enclosure, their solipsism that blinds them to their child's existence. This would be where the "village" comes in, where someone -- a teacher or aunt or neighbor -- looks in her eyes and asks about her feeling. Asks so well and listens so well that she may break down her shell.