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What are the precursors of teen suicide? Are today's young people really more vulnerable than their parents?

"What is the meaning of human life, whether I exist is no longer meaningful" The young Hu Xinyu has left this world forever.

On February 2, 2023, a press conference on the Hu Xinyu incident was held, and it was determined that Hu Xinyu died by hanging.

According to the World Health Organization, suicide is the second leading cause of death among adolescents aged 15 to 19 years. Suicidal tendencies increase linearly from age 12 to 15 and then increase more slowly before age 17. These questions may help us better understand negative emotions and signs of suicide in adolescents, and perhaps your help can save a life if necessary.

Q: At what stage is the incidence of adolescent psychological disorders? How to effectively prevent children from "thinking about it"?

A: Data shows that adolescence, especially between the ages of 12 and 17, is a time at high risk for suicide:

Worldwide, suicide is the third leading cause of death among adolescents aged 15-19 years;

2. According to the results of a nationwide survey of urban adolescent health risk behaviors in 2005, 19.6% of the subjects had considered suicide, 6% had made suicide plans, and 2.4% had taken suicidal actions;

3. According to the 2020 National Mental Health Blue Book Survey, 24.6% of adolescents have depressive symptoms and 7.4% have severe depression.

Therefore, in addition to expressing grief and condolences for the Hu Mouyu incident, it is also a window for us to understand the psychological problems of adolescents.

So, how do we avoid such incidents?

80% of people give very clear signals before committing suicide.

1. Sudden drastic changes. For example, large fluctuations in grades and irritability.

2. Problems sleeping and eating. Difficulty falling asleep, waking up early, night terrors, frequent nightmares, etc., not thinking about tea and rice or eating too much.

3. Talk about death. Make jokes about suicide, express thoughts about death, or talk about how it feels to die, etc.

4. Give away what you like and what you are precious to, and say goodbye to your relatives and friends for no reason.

5. Self-injury, self-injury, unknown wounds and scars on the body.

For parents and teachers, the most easily noticed are explicit wounds, sleep instability, and food instability.

For classmates, if your friend starts talking about death or joking about suicide, be sure to pay attention to their emotional problems.

The reason why a person, a child, chooses to commit suicide must have lost all hope. A small attention can change their fate.

Source: Chenyu Shen (Attending physician, Department of Mental Health, Yuquan Hospital, Tsinghua University)

Q: Does teen suicide have a contagious effect? Hu Xinyu incident: How should parents guide their children to view it rationally?

A: Of course, suicide is contagious, and like the Hu Mouyu case, the scope of contagion is very wide, because the details of the incident and the impact of the spread have become much larger and faster.

Therefore, it is very important to pay attention to the ripple effect of suicidal behavior (in layman's terms, "suicide is contagious"), and subsequent interventions.

Many people think that a vigorous teenager will definitely not end in this way, but will we really understand what he has encountered and felt? Not necessarily.

I have always felt that it is necessary to think about this incident, or any similar incident in recent years, with a series of highly similar events that have occurred subsequently, which is the social ripple effect of suicidal behavior that I want to talk about.

Source: Visual China

If you throw a stone into the lake, in addition to the center of the landing point, there will be a circle of outward ripples around, and the greater the impact of the central event, the greater the ripple may be, and the greater the external impact. The influence of social events can cause the following psychological conditions in people who think the same way:

First, a strong sense of indirect experience. If there is no good support, then the indirect experience will develop into similar behaviors to the incident, such as the dozen consecutive jumps that occurred in a large OEM factory that year, or the frequent violent rights protection and medical troubles in previous years, which are actually the effects of the ripple effect.

Second, relatively strong behavioral motivation. Because people similar to themselves will feel that this method is used as a method, and it can work.

Third, anxiety is escalating. Because the event has a lot of impact, the story will continue, and details and long exposures will bring anxiety.

That being the case, it is necessary to intervene when the incident does not occur.

But in the current situation, the intervention is a rather complex process, parents only need to remember one thing, that is, do not fight, do not deny, do not demand their children too much, this will put a lot of pressure on adolescent children, and at the same time will make them unable to find themselves well. Coupled with the psychological characteristics of adolescent children themselves, the risk will be great.

Source: Shifang Canaan (Ph.D. in Criminal Psychology in Chinese Political Law and Law)

Q: Are children really more vulnerable these days? Why are children more likely to have psychological problems when living conditions are better?

A: At present, the prevalence of depression and bipolar disorder in adolescents and children is getting higher and higher, and the younger age of the disease is becoming more and more prominent, which is a fact that cannot be ignored. Why do adolescents and children suffer from mental and psychological disorders today? I summarize 4 points from the perspective of scientific spiritual psychology:

First, in different eras, the two generations have different needs in the process of growing up.

When the post-60s and post-70s generations were young, there was relative material scarcity in China. According to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the parents' generation grows up more eager to be satisfied with survival needs and security needs.

With the rapid development of the country's economy, the children of the post-90s and post-00s generations do not have to face survival and security problems as soon as they are born, and there is still a surplus of materials. When the lower physiological needs and security needs are satisfied, this generation will resort to higher needs, that is, emotional and belonging needs, respect needs, and self-actualization needs.

In other words, children and adolescents now pay more attention to spiritual needs.

They want emotional attention, support, and understanding from their parents, they want their ideas to be respected, and they want to work in areas that are both financially rewarding and that they enjoy and realize the value of their lives.

But this is exactly what many post-60s and post-70s parents have long ignored. They still educate and demand their children in the same way as their parents, lack high-quality parent-child companionship, and know almost nothing about their children's inner world. This is very easy to cause superimposed psychological trauma to the child.

Second, in the Internet age, contrast is everywhere, and parents' rough education can easily cause children to form a huge psychological gap.

After many parents were beaten and scolded when they were children, they soon found that their peers had also been beaten and scolded by their parents, and some were beaten even harder.

Therefore, they quickly adjusted their cognition based on the information they were exposed to, rationalizing the "sins they had suffered", and it was not easy to form psychological trauma.

If, under the scolding of their parents, and then through their own efforts, they finally obtained a good education and job, and "mixed well", then it is easy for them to sublimate this "stick education"; It is believed that children should be beaten when they are disobedient, especially boys, "if they do not fight, they cannot be successful", and if they do not hit, parents have not fulfilled their responsibility for education.

Today's children are born with the Internet and electronic products, and are exposed to a wide range of information.

At the same time, with the general improvement of national quality, the concept of scientific family education has sprouted, many young parents have abandoned the education method based on beating and scolding, and there are many articles and information on the Internet that discuss the drawbacks of "stick education".

Then if the child is still beaten and scolded at this time, they can compare the object from offline to online, the range is very wide, and they find that the parents of many families not only do not beat their children, but also respect and understand their children very much, then their psychological gap will be very large.

There is no harm without contrast, not only will they envy "other people's parents", but the beatings and scoldings they have suffered will also form greater psychological trauma.

Source: Visual China

Third, in the age of the internet, children are more susceptible to the negative effects of bad information.

In the "information cocoon" of the Internet, if the child repeatedly receives similar bad information, it is easy to form wrong, distorted cognition, and even appear three-view bias and paranoid personality characteristics.

Fourth, under the involution of education, some parents blindly "chicken dolls", children have great psychological pressure, and are more likely to have a mental breakdown.

In the childhood of the parents of the post-60s and post-70s, their parents were busy with their livelihood, and there were no off-campus tutoring institutions in the society. On the whole, their parents do not intervene much and are not very demanding of their children's learning.

Today's parents generally agree that "knowledge can change destiny", and hope that their children can get good jobs through high education, achieve good and stable economic returns, and live a stable and prosperous life.

Many parents strictly require their children to achieve excellent results, exert pressure, arrange one tutoring class after another, the family atmosphere is depressed and tense, and the debasement and blow to their children is far more than recognition and encouragement...

This is all an inappropriate "chicken baby" way, which can easily cause superimposed psychological trauma to children and bury hidden dangers.

The above 4 points are summarized in the practice of multidisciplinary diagnosis and treatment model (MDT), but each child's situation is different, and the specific psychological root causes of mental and psychological disorders should be analyzed on a case-by-case basis.

Source: Sunny Day Psychology He Rihui (Psychiatrist-Psychologist)

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