A suicide at age 8? Very rare, but it happens

CINCINNATI — The death was startling even to the coroner: a boy only eight years old, apparently killing himself in his Cincinnati bedroom.

Now Gabriel Taye’s January death is being re-examined, after it emerged that he was bullied and knocked unconscious at school two days before he died.

Hamilton County Coroner Lakshmi Sammarco’s office has ruled Gabriel’s death a suicide, but she said last week that she was reopening the investigation to re-examine the boy’s injuries and whether there were contributing factors to his death.

“It was very hard for me to believe that an eight-year-old would even know what it means to commit suicide,” Sammarco said.

Suicides are rare among children so young, but not unheard of. Statistics from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show an average of 14 suicides per year nationwide among children 10 or younger since 1999. That compares to over 1,400 per year among 11- to 18-year-olds.

At eight, children generally are just coming to understand death, says Dr. Louis Kraus, chief of child psychiatry at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. Conceiving of ending their own lives can be even more remote.

“It’s possible, but at this young age, it’s very uncommon,” Kraus said. Even if a child has an idea of suicide, “many kids this young really don’t conceptualize the permanency of what they’re doing and what could happen.”

Experts stress that at any age, suicide is a complex decision that often reflects a combination of life events and psychiatric problems, whether diagnosed or not.

Warning signs can be harder to read in young children than older people, said Dr. Alec Miller, chief of child and adolescent psychology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. But while kids might not have the vocabulary to discuss depression, it still might show up, perhaps as a change in behaviour or complaints about aches or fatigue with no physical explanation, Kraus notes.

Gabriel had no history of mental health issues, said Carla Leader, a lawyer for his mother, Cornelia Reynolds.