The following is the latest installation in NewsOne’s Special Series, An American Crisis: Black Child Suicide.
If you’re experiencing distress or need someone to talk to, you can dial 988 at any time for immediate support. Trained counselors are available to provide confidential support and assistance. You are not alone.
By some accounts, KM’s (initials used to protect privacy) suicidal ideation began during his junior year in high school with the death of his grandmother and then eight months later, his mother’s. His story gives real-world definition to all those terrible statistics, numbers without names, without faces, without narratives, that have been included in the recent data about the rise in Black child suicide and here, specifically, the rise in Black boy’s suicidal ideation, suicide attempts and completed deaths by suicide. In 2021, JAMA reported that between 2013 and 2019, Black boys and young men dying by suicide had risen by a stunning 47%. At this writing, those numbers have not downturned. Indeed, predictions are worse because those numbers do not include the mental health challenges that impacted–and continue to impact—Black children in the wake of the pandemic of 2020 and 2021.
In KM’s case, as is true for many of our children, the only way his pain could be understood was by either mislabeling and problematizing it or else limiting it. Early in life he was labeled “the bad kid” because he could be disruptive in school as the class clown. Later, into high school, after the losses of his mother and grandmother, others thought that of course, now, his pain was legitimate, understandable. Anyone might be driven to the edge in the aftermath of such significant deaths in a young person’s life. But the truth and the timeline of his trauma, including his thoughts of suicide, require a mapping that reaches back at least to when he was in grammar school. And if not for the dedication and love of his principal,…
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