Report: Teen suicides in Mecklenburg on the upswing

Suicides among Mecklenburg County youths spiked so dramatically in 2012 that state health officials called the county’s team that searches for ways to prevent child deaths to ask why.

Seven teens killed themselves in 2012 and six a year later, said Marni Eisner, chair of the county’s Child Prevention and Protection Team, who delivered the team’s annual report to county commissioners Tuesday.

“In 2012, the whole state had 35 suicides and we had seven of them,” Eisner said. “That means that every other county had zero or one suicide. The numbers in 2014 won’t be significantly lower.”

Attempted suicides also were up. The report said 15 percent of high school students seriously contemplated killing themselves; the percentage of middle school students was higher at 23 percent.

The 13 suicides in 2012 and 2013, the two latest years cleared by the state, were among 245 infants and children who died in Mecklenburg County during that period.

Nineteen percent of the deaths were preventable, Eisner said.

Of the total, 65 percent were infants less than a year old. More than half, 56 percent, were African-American children and 25 percent were white.

North Carolina had the country’s worst infant mortality rate 25 years ago when state legislators ordered each county to establish a team to review child deaths and find ways to prevent them.

Now, the state’s rate is in the middle, Eisner said. “So we’ve made significant strides the past 25 years,” she said.

The commissioners found the report sobering.

Infant deaths in 2012 and 2013 were due mainly to birth defects, prematurity and pregnancy complications. But three were murdered and another three accidentally suffocated.

“I literally cried reading this report,” commissioner Ella Scarborough said. “To lose those children is heart-breaking.”

This story was originally published May 5, 2015 at 8:53 PM with the headline "Report: Teen suicides in Mecklenburg on the upswing."