2024 AZ Child Fatality Report: Suicide Still Not Leading Cause of Death For Children
A difficult subject to discuss, child suicide data requires perspective - and de-politiciziation
Arizona’s 2024 Annual Report1 on child fatalities is out - and, yet again, suicide was not “the leading cause of death” in children contrary to the morbid claims of those who insist, without evidence, otherwise. My comments on the 2023 report are here - including how some policy advocates, usually involving a push for expanding mental health services, assert false suicide claims to manipulate public opinion, even in Arizona.
You hear this especially from advocates of sexualized identity groups with medical or mental health policy demands, as I wrote here:
Purposely asserting false claims on child suicide deaths is not just unethical - it’s more than that - it’s immoral and obscene, and should be roundly condemned when you see it. It’s not easy for me to go through these reports. I don’t like it. But no one else is openly correcting the record when these false claims come out - and that ticks me off.
To paraphrase Pope Benedict XVI when speaking of the Church’s view of real social justice, if you don’t stand up with the truth, others will beat you down - with power:
"Without truth, without trust and love for what is true, there is no social conscience and responsibility, and social action ends up serving private interests and the logic of power.”
So here we go, just the data, with some commentary and context.
In 2023, the number of child deaths by suicide was 54, up from 46 in 2022 in a year in which Arizona’s population grew 1.6%.
54 deaths represent 6% of all 853 child deaths that year.
Yet again the number of deaths by neglect and abuse by adults is greater than suicides by a factor of two: 116, representing 14% of all deaths.
Unfortunately, the report’s authors cite risk factors associated with suicides but without defining the categories. So we can only speculate what constitutes “child relationship issues” or “school issues” - but substance use is plain enough:
39% to 41% of all suicides involved drug use in some way. In fact substance use was involved in 1 out of 5 of every child death - regardless of cause. Addressing drug use would go far to cut the number of these deaths.
Similarly, 71% of all deaths by neglect and abuse involved parent drug use - and that’s just abhorrent and gut-wrenching.
Finally, some important contextual data.
In the 2023 school year, there were 1,125,887 children of school age enrolled in all Arizona schools.2 Obviously that does not include children under 5 or 6 years of age, so it’s not a complete number when discussing childhood deaths - but it is helpful in the suicide context: 77% of all suicides in this period occurred in ages 15-17, 23% were in ages 10-14.
So, we can reasonably say that 54 suicides out of 1,125,887 children translates to 0.0048% of the entire population of school aged children are at risk of suicide.
That’s a less than half percent chance that a suicide occurs in any school, at any time, in any part of the state. It is that rare.
Public resources and policy should reflect that assessment of risk.
As a side note, 64% of all suicides were male. This seems to be the case every year, suggesting our culture continues to have a blind sport for the unique problems affecting boys in all sorts of ways. And 82% of those deaths were either white or Hispanic. Suicide is simply not a black or Asian thing, and that is worth further study.
End.
The 2024 Annual Report collates child deaths for the 2023 calendar year. You can access the report here: https://www.azdhs.gov/documents/prevention/womens-childrens-health/reports-fact-sheets/child-fatality-review-annual-reports/cfr-annual-report-2023.pdf
Enrollment data available here: https://www.azed.gov/accountability-research/data/