Child Suicides – what’s left unsaid

After all these years of Prozac and drugging of children with mental health issues and so little access to mental health services, it’s refreshing to see students and their petition for improving these services in the schools.

Thank you students at Mounds View and Hopkins high schools for speaking out and your effort to create a more compassionate and safe atmosphere for troubled youth.

When child suicides make the news (today’s Star Tribune article), there is a gaping hole where failed suicide attempts and other self harming behaviors of children should be accounted for and reckoned with.

State Ward children so often have dangerous lifestyles – self harming and even life threatening behaviors that we don’t speak of and no one knows but a few people involved in these tragedies.

When foster child Kendrea Johnson hung herself the County Corornor stated that six year old children just did not have the mental capacity to execute a suicide successfully (he called her death an accident – she left a note).

The Star Tribune’s chart showing 5-14 year old children as a tiny part of child suicides would be dwarfed by including their attempted suicides, cutting and other self harming behaviors.

All Adults Are The Protectors of All Children

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Child Suicides, Self Harm & Statistics

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the Children’s Hospital Association have joined forces to declare a national emergency in children’s mental health, largely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. “Today’s declaration is an urgent call to policymakers at all levels of government — we must treat this mental health crisis like the emergency it is,” said AAP President Lee Savio Beers, MD, in a statement.

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Child Summit

Managing child protection cases, she said, “means one judge, one family. It means you don’t [delay] these cases because someone is sick. You don’t make a kid wait in foster care three months while we tend to adult problems. It means that when parents leave the courthouse, they have a written notice of the next court hearing and a written case plan so they’re not wondering what the judges meant.”

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Child Trafficking: Singular Story and Global Perspective

Human trafficking is the third most profitable criminal activity nationally and in the world. It is superseded only by the trafficking of weapons and drugs.   Human trafficking generates $32 billion in the US alone annually and $150 billion globally. While sex trafficking is largely associated with girls and women, young boys are just as likely to be…

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Child Trauma Academy Newsletter

Symposium on Child Trauma in the Public Sector: May 31 – June 1, 2012

“Many children experience stressful events that challenge their coping resources. Some children experience a single harrowing event or multiple adverse events which impact their development and their behavior. Everyone whose work brings them into the lives of children needs to understand the latest research and policies regarding child trauma.”

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Child Trauma and Abuse; A Quick Study & Resources

Few of us understand the lifelong impact trauma has on a child and fewer still the depth and scope of generational child abuse in America today. This KARA page provides basic information and the critical elements that you & your friends and neighbors need to know for trauma & abuse to be reduced in your own community. Share it widely.

All Adults Are the Protectors of All Children

Send us your favorite resources (we will post those that fit)

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Child Trauma and Torture Reporting for July 2018 (part 5)

KARA (Kids At Risk Action) tracks current news about at risk children bringing transparency and attention to our youngest and most vulnerable citizens.

This reporting is only sampling of what should be reported – the great majority of child trauma & abuse is never known.

37% of children overall and 54% of Black children are reported to child protection services in America by the time they turn 18.

(American Journal of Public Health 1.17)

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Child vs Family 2 (thank you safe passage for children of MN)

This article from Safe Passage for Children bears repeating;

Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACES) research shows that abuse disrupts children’s brain development in ways that often aren’t reversible. This is a reason for county child protection agencies to remove children from abusive situations. But there are also benefits to keeping children at home.

Historically counties favored keeping families intact, sometimes despite serious ongoing abuse. Today they are giving child safety more weight. But we still basically have a bad either/or choice: remove children or leave them at risk.

We need services that keep children in stable settings while preserving relationships with parents and fostering safe reunions. Concepts that have surfaced include supportive community residences where parents and children live together, and foster care with a parent mentoring component.

Experimenting with ideas like these could resolve this child vs family dilemma. Join this Safe Passage Discussion on Facebook

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