NEWSLETTER

Society for the History of Children and Youth

Reflections on Writing a History of Youth Suicide

Kathleen W. Jones, Virginia Tech

Youth suicide is not a joyful topic, but it is an important one.  I’ve used that line in grant and fellowship proposals – some funded, some not.  It is the way I think about a topic that causes other historians to shiver or raise eyebrows and ask how I can do the research that gives me material for a history of self-inflicted deaths of young people.  Depressing, even morbid, yes . . . but youth suicide is certainly not a new phenomenon and I am easily tempted to generalize that young people have engaged in acts of self-destruction in all times and places.  While such a grandiose claim would certainly make the topic “important,” I can only speak to the behavior of young people in Europe and North America in the past 150 years or so.  During those years, as changes in family, education, popular culture, and the economy dramatically altered the life experiences of children and youths, the fact that in all eras some young people engaged in suicidal behavior has remained a given.  We cannot look back to a golden age when young people were not listed among the suicide statistics.  The ways they explained their choices about life and death and the interpretations their elders gave to the decisions have much to tell the historian about the experiences young people encountered while growing up and the expectations placed on them.

Importance is sometimes gauged by numbers, and to be sure, it is possible to turn our current US statistics into a “crisis” in need of historical context.  By some measures, the rate of youth suicide has increased 300% since mid-century.  By other measures, youth suicide in 2008 is the third leading cause of death for those aged 15 to 19, the second for college-age young people.  A recent national survey claims that 6 percent of undergraduates “seriously considered” suicide in the past twelve months.  Of the 26,000 students surveyed for this study, more than half indicated they’d had “at least one episode of suicidal thinking at some point in their lives.” [1]  The suicidal student seems to be uppermost in the minds of those who study the current youth suicide crisis.  Yet despite this concern, many researchers believe that campus suicide intervention and prevention strategies are not adequate to the task of keeping young people safe from self-destruction.

Numbers, however, can be misleading.  First, claims of a “crisis” in youth suicide must be tempered when youth rates are compared to the rates of suicide among the elderly.  If there is a suicide “crisis” today, it is among this older age group, not among the young.  Second, the current “crisis” numbers are relative and reflect the decline over the century in deaths from infectious diseases and also the recent declining figures for youth homicide.  And finally, the college campus seems to be a preventive rather than a risk for suicide; the rate of student suicides is significantly lower than the rate among youths who do not attend college.[2] Yet it is the student suicide that, since the 1920s at least, has garnered the most attention among suicidologists.   And for most of those years, it was the male Caucasian student whose self-destructive tendencies were of greatest interest. These facts about the current “crisis” are the elements I find “important” about this less than joyful subject.

While I am interested in numbers, my work is much more about the cultural meanings given to self destruction and the representations of young people who engage in suicidal behavior.  What, beyond age, was and is “youthful” about youth suicide?  When and how did “youth” suicide, and especially “student” suicide come to be the focus of suicide prevention and intervention strategies? What role did psychiatrists, psychologists, and child development specialists play in the emergence of a separate category of “youth suicide;” to what extent is youth suicide a construct of age specialization in the human sciences?  What is it that a young person’s deliberate act of self-destruction represents to a culture that claims to put its young people first and value youth as the “future?”  Why, and with what effect on our current strategies to combat suicidal behavior, were the suicides of African-American, Latino, and Asian-American males largely unrecognized?  Or, for that matter, the self-destructive behavior of young women, or the relationship between suicide and gender identity.  These are the questions driving my research.  In the various cultures of suicide, I would argue, we find a microcosm of the qualities that have defined “youth” in modern society, and in the categories of exclusion, a catalog of traits we have not allowed to be “youthful.”

In the historical records, youth suicide is everywhere – that’s a line I’ve used to describe the search for sources to study the history of youth suicide. Youth suicide can be found in government investigations and in clinical records.  It has been the stuff of newspaper headlines since the beginnings of the penny press in the 1830s.  Youth suicide can be found in the records of medical examiners, and the archives of universities and colleges. It has been the object of study by psychologists, psychiatrists, child developmentalists, educators, sociologists, and epidemiologists, and the subject of poems, novels, and songs. Student journalists made it a subject of campus newspaper articles and editorials. Sadly, however, youths’ version of youth suicide is rarely recorded, and when it is, when, for example, their suicide notes were reprinted in the newspapers, their words often served adults as evidence of the trivial emotions of young people, the silliness of their actions, and the superiority of grown-up rationality.

The historical records do not let us speculate about the psychopathology of the individual who commits suicide.  Instead, they can show us how emotional turmoil or mental illness has come to be seen as the defining characteristic of suicidal behavior. And how, to a great extent, suicide has become juvenilized – is that a word for our field? – as acts of self-destruction at any age are made to seem “childish.”  These records also tell us what emotional turmoil has meant in different historical contexts as that turmoil was observed in young people. The history of youth suicide certainly provides a window onto adult speculations about the darker emotions of childhood.  And taken together, these records let us problematize the psychological view of suicide as self-inflicted violence, or violence against self, determined by mental instability or neurochemical imbalance. This definition focuses us away from the social setting and the political implications of youth suicide. The history of youth suicide suggests, in contrast, that suicide is an act of violence occurring within a network of actors who define the opportunities and the constraints on purposeful action. Such a view of “violence against self” enables us to see the threat of youth suicide as an occasion for policing the behaviors and the experiences of all young people, a tool in a power system that structures age relationships and marginalizes the emotions of the young.

NOTES

1.     Study reported by Scott Jaschik, “Redefining Suicide Risk – and Prevention Strategy,” Inside Higher Education. August 18, 2008.  http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/08/18/suicide

2.     Allan J. Schwartz.  “Student Suicide in the United States: 1990-1991 Through 2003-2004,” Journal of American College Health 54 (2006): 348.