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Cincinnati Enquirer
In the mind of an
8-year-old: Experts say young children can understand suicide
Anne Saker
One piercing question from the January suicide of 8-year-old Gabriel
Taye of Cincinnati haunts parents and teachers alike: How can a young
child know enough about self-destruction to carry it out?
One simple answer, say experts who deal with youth suicide, rests in
our common humanity: The mind of an 8-year-old child has the capacity
to think about death, even suicide.
“An 8-year-old can understand the finality of death, the
irreversibility of death, even though those are kind of the two main
features that go along with what you’d consider to be more of an adult
view,” said Dr. Paul Crosby, chief medical officer at the Lindner
Center for Hope in Mason and a psychiatrist who treats children and
teenagers.
“This really has been a problem for as long as there have been
children,” said Dr. Michael Sorter, chief of the division of child and
adolescent psychiatry at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.
“To have a very young child get involved in suicide activity, that’s a
rare event. But it’s not unheard of to have preteens attempt suicide
and, regretfully, end up in the worst outcome.”
In youth, the human brain soaks up everything, including ideas about
death and suicide. Access to the internet expands that knowledge.
Sometimes, adults complicate matters with a reluctance to let go of the
notion that childhood is a death-free zone.
“The myth that young children don’t think about death or suicide is
really starting to change in the last decade,” said John Ackerman,
suicide prevention coordinator with the Center for Suicide Prevention
and Research at Nationwide Children’s Hospital Behavioral Health in
Columbus. “Most people, a while back, didn’t think children could be
depressed. There are very clear signs of depression in children, but
the neurological transmission is different, where the parts of the
brain work together.”
Gabriel Taye, a third-grader at Carson Elementary School in West Price
Hill, hanged himself Jan. 26 at home. His mother Cornelia Reynolds has
said she believes he was repeatedly bullied at school – including two
days before his death.
A school video from Jan. 24 shows a Carson student pulling Gabriel to a
restroom floor, where he apparently lost consciousness. For six
minutes, as he lay on the tile, other students touched and kicked him
until an administrator arrived and roused him.
A Cincinnati police homicide detective reviewing the security camera
footage wrote in a Feb. 3 report to Cincinnati Public Schools officials
that he considered the behavior to be bullying that bordered on
criminal assault...
Read the rest of the article at the Cincinnati Enquirer
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