GUNS, YOUNG PEOPLE AND SUICIDE

Last year, nearly 40,000 people died in the U.S. from the use of firearms. Among those deaths, roughly 60 percent were suicides. And among those were more than 1000 young people between the ages of 10 and 19; nearly three children or teenagers every day.

As a quick internet search will show you, there's a lot of information available to parents, teachers and other concerned people about how to reduce the risk that a child will commit suicide. Unfortunately, many of these well-meaning and supposedly authoritative sources gloss over or fail even to mention the single biggest step to take to reduce the number of suicides by young people.

That step is--get guns out of their homes.

Young people and guns--a lethal combination

Credit: publicdomainpictures.net

New research from the Boston School of Public Health (BUSPH) shows that on a state-by-state basis, every ten percent increase in gun ownership increases the youth suicide rate by 27 percent. That means that young people in states like Alaska, with the highest rate of gun ownership, were five times more likely to kill themselves than young people in states like New Jersey with the lowest percentage of guns in homes.

The rate of gun ownership varies greatly from state to state. The 10 states with the highest rates averaged more than one gun for every two households (52.5%), while the 10 states with the lowest gun ownership averaged just one gun per every five households.

Remarkably, gun ownership outweighed every other factor--poverty, race, educational levels, family structure, mental illness, drug and alcohol use, you name it--contributing to youth suicide. "This study demonstrates that the strongest single predictor of a state's youth suicide rate is the prevalence of household gun ownership in that state," says Michael Siegel, a community health researcher at BUSPH and the study's co-author.

The bottom line is clear. If you want to reduce the number of children and teenagers who kill themselves, the first and most significant thing to do is to get guns out of their homes.

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You can find the full study here.

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Young people in the U.S. are far more at risk from gun-related violence of all kinds than youth in other countries. You can read a zerospinzone post about that here.

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USING SMARTPHONES OR TABLETS AT BEDTIME IMPAIRS CHILDREN'S SLEEP

If your children are among the 80-plus percent who have one or more media-linked devices in their bedrooms, they are also likely not to be sleeping long enough or deeply enough at night, and to be drowsy during the day.

Sleeping students/Credit: L. Krittaya

Public health researchers at Cardiff University, in Wales, scoured the research literature and found 20 studies involving more than 125,000 students that examined the link between sleep and the presence and use of screen media by children and adolescents worldwide. The results were unequivocal--use of such media at bedtime significantly reduced both the quality and quantity of sleep, and showed up in daytime drowsiness as well, compared to children without access to media at bedtime.

Writing in the October 31, 2016 issue of JAMA Pediatrics, the authors point out that degraded sleep isn't just a matter of a grouchy, hard-to-wake-child or nodding off in class. Impaired sleep in children is linked to poorer nutrition, obesity, weakened immunity, stunted growth and a variety of mental health issues.

“Sleep is an often undervalued but important part of children’s development," says lead author Ben Carter, from the Cardiff University School of Medicine. "With the ever growing popularity of portable media devices, such as smartphones and tablets, the problem of poor sleep amongst children is set to get worse."

Dr. Carter's prescription-- " . . . an integrated approach involving parents, teachers, and healthcare professionals . . . to improve sleep habits near bedtime.”

If you'ld like to read the full article, it's available for free here.