For children between the ages of 10 and 14, suicide is the second-leading cause of death, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. Unfortunately, the stats aren’t getting better. When it comes to children’s health, new research shows a sharp rise in kids and pills as preteens turn to medications to hurt themselves. A study published Sept. 8 in the journal Pediatrics looked at more than 1.5 million calls to poison centers involving children ages 6 to 12. The researchers found a 311% increase since 2000 in cases tied to suspected self-harm, with the largest spike among 11- and 12-year-olds.
The findings match wider problems in teen mental health. The CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey reported that in 2023, 20% of high-school students said they had seriously considered suicide, and 9% said they had attempted it in the past year. The CDC bluntly stated: “Our nation’s youth are experiencing a mental health crisis.”
“These aren’t illicit drugs — they’re in every medicine cabinet,” Dr. Kyle Johnson, a child psychiatrist at Oregon Health & Science University, told Natural News. “A child might grab a handful of Tylenol or cold medicine, not realizing it could kill them.” The data align with a 2022 JAMA Pediatrics study showing nearly half of adolescents use household medications to harm themselves.
Dr. Mike Franz, senior medical director of behavioral health at Regence, told the outlet that parents often underestimate the risk to 10- to 12-year-olds, since toddlers have been the main focus of concern. “These kids are impulsive, lack consequence awareness and are bombarded by stressors — pandemic aftermath, climate doom, social media — without the tools to cope.”
The pandemic caused isolation and disrupted routines. Kids spent more time on digital gadgets. The amount of screen time has increased 89% since 2019, according to JAMA. Social media has had a hand in exacerbating the danger of kids and pills, amplifying anxiety and depression while using algorithms “pushing extreme ideations,” Natural News explained. A 2023 American Psychological Association report found that heavy social media use created a 13-66% higher risk of suicide in teens. Climate change played a role, too. A Lancet study discovered that 59% of youth felt “very worried” and many also reported feeling that “humanity is doomed.”
In 2004, the FDA put a black-box warning on antidepressants, saying they could raise the risk of suicidal thoughts in children and teens. Even with that warning, CDC data show prescriptions for 10- to 12-year-olds went up by 40% between 2015 and 2022. “We’re treating symptoms with drugs that may worsen the underlying issue,” Johnson said.
What is truly frightening is that today 56% of American children take multiple medications each week, as Natural News explained. This has doubled since 2000, causing dependency for health issues such as anxiety, ADHD, or sleep problems becoming the norm and popularizing kids and pills.
“We’ve medicalized childhood,” Franz said. “Kids learn that pills fix problems, so they turn to them in crisis.”
And this doesn’t include the therapeutic errors such as incorrect dosages. These accounted for “48.6% of exposures while 4.7% were intentional self-harm – yet these cases were 14 times more likely to require hospitalization and 8 times more likely to cause serious harm than accidental exposures,” the outlet reported.
A 2022 study in Clinical Toxicology found that self-poisoning attempts rose 26% among 6- to 19-year-olds from 2015 to 2020. The sharpest increases were in 10- to 12-year-olds, and more than three-quarters of cases involved girls.
A 2023 study published in Pediatrics examined how diagnoses of anxiety disorders and their treatment in doctor’s offices have changed in 12 years among children, adolescents, and young adults. Researchers divided the time into three periods (2006-2009, 2010-2013, and 2014-2018) and categorized treatments into four options (therapy only, medications only, both therapy and medication, or neither) as PubMed detailed. Over that span, visits with an anxiety disorder diagnosis rose sharply. In the first block of time, about 1.4% of office visits involved an anxiety disorder; by 2014-2018, it had increased to about 4.2%.
Despite that rise, the use of therapy declined. In the earliest period, nearly half of those diagnosed received therapy, either alone or with medication. By 2014-2018, that fraction had dropped to approximately 32.6%. However, visits where medication was used without therapy became more likely. PubMed explained that, in 2014-2018, patients were more than twice as likely to receive medication alone compared with 2006-2009.
The rise in medication-related self-harm involving kids and pills among preteens is clear and troubling. It comes alongside worsening mental health across youth. There isn’t just one cause – more kids are struggling, more medications are in homes and easy to reach.