Survivors promise it gets better as research shows surge in suicide deaths for young girls

WARNING: This story contains distressing details.

In light of a new Canadian study showing an unprecedented spike in suicide deaths among young girls, women who've made it to the other side of their tough teen years are urging struggling adolescents not to give up hope.

The research, published recently in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, shows the rate of suicides among girls ages 10-14 surging for nine straight years, peaking in 2018 at about twice the death rate for boys. Throughout those same years, the male death rate slowly declined.

"It's highly atypical for females to die by suicide more than males in any age group," lead author Dr. Rachel Mitchell told CBC News.

Just this week, in fact, a Senate committee released a report on suicide prevention that notes overall suicide rates in Canada have remained stable in recent years, with men accounting for 75 per cent of all deaths.

Mitchell, a child and youth psychiatrist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, said she was so shocked by the results that she asked colleagues to double check her math. 

But the numbers match up with her clinical experience. She's seen the average age of patients referred to her office through emergency departments drop in recent years.

"Young children ages 10 to 14 are dying by suicide by their own hand, and that shouldn't happen. That rate should be zero," she said.

Hattie Zhang, a 21-year-old volunteer with Crisis Centre B.C., said she remembers those ages as the time when she began struggling with her mental health. She now tells young girls that they can get through this if they reach out for help.

"Depression … messes up your perception of what the future is going to be like, what you're like," she said.

"Don't let it trick you into thinking that this is it, that there's no help available, that you don't have a reason to go on."

The research is based on 18 years of publicly available data from the years Canadian Vital Statistics Database, which gives the age range (e.g. 10-14) and sex at birth of the children who've died, but not details on exact ages, race and ethnicity, sexuality or gender identity.

It shows that suicide rates decreased in both male and female children ages 10-14 from 2000 through 2009, when the rates diverged. The trend among girls began taking a strong upward turn at that point, increasing by an average of about seven per cent each year. 

By 2011, the rate of suicide deaths among young female adolescents had climbed above the male rate, and the gap grew steadily from there.