Nearly 1 in 10 Maryland high school students reported attempting suicide at least once in the year leading up to the fall of 2022, according to the latest results from a national survey administered every two years by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. An even greater share of students said they seriously considered attempting suicide (17.9%) or made a plan about how they would attempt suicide (14.
3%), according to the Maryland Youth Risk Behavior Survey and Youth Tobacco Survey . As alarming as those numbers are, they’re a marked improvement over the prior year when about 1 in 6 high schoolers said they had attempted to take their own life one or more times in the previous 12 months, a period when the coronavirus pandemic had closed most schools for in-person learning. With such self-reported data, it can be difficult to understand what a child means when they say they have attempted suicide, said Dr.
Gloria Reeves, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the University of Maryland Children’s Hospital and an associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. High schoolers answering the question could be thinking about self-harm behaviors they’ve carried out not because they wanted to die, but because they were dealing with overwhelming feelings of numbness, isolation or stress. They also could be thinking of suicidal ideation that they never acted upon, but felt so intense and scary that they label it as an attempt.
Or they could.