Abstract
Both children and adolescents do commit suicide. Although suicide is rare in children younger than age 12, it occurs with greater frequency than most people imagine. The youngest child that we are aware of was 4. Suicide is also all too frequent in adolescents. Many countries saw a striking rise in suicide in this age group between the 1950s and the late 1970s. Australia, Canada, Great Britain, Holland, Israel, Japan, United States, West Germany, and others have all reported high rates by 1980, although the rate of suicide has leveled off in some countries (e.g., Canada, United States). Boys traditionally have a higher rate of completed suicide than girls in adolescence, but in childhood the reported rates are higher in girls. Lester and McIntosh elsewhere in this book have presented the demographic data.
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© 1991 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Leenaars, A.A., Wenckstern, S. (1991). Suicide in the School-Age Child and Adolescent. In: Leenaars, A.A. (eds) Life Span Perspectives of Suicide. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-0724-0_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-0724-0_8
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