Mary Lawal was 8 years old the first time she tried to take her own life.
Time has blurred the details for Lawal, now a 22-year-old psychology student at Prince George’s Community College. She doesn’t remember the circumstances that led up to her attempt — Did she have a fight with her parents? An argument with her siblings? — or how, as a child, she even knew suicide was possible. She has only a vague memory of feeling lonely and unlovable.
“I don’t think I had a full understanding of what I was doing,” she said.
In the last two decades, overall suicide rates in the U.S. have risen by more than a third. They are also up for children ages 8 to 12 — especially among young girls. Nearly 1 in 10 Maryland high school students reported having attempted suicide at least once in the year leading up to fall of 2022, according to results from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey.
But there are reasons to be hopeful. For two years, in Maryland and across the country, the 988 suicide and crisis hotline has made it easier to ask for help. And earlier this month, U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat, introduced legislation that would create a federal grant program to support evidence-based models for stabilizing people with serious thoughts of suicide. Raskin lost his son to suicide in December 2020.
While suicidal ideation — thinking about or formulating plans for suicide — can be terrifying and isolating, research shows it also is treatable through psychotherapy, medication, family and social support, and other treatments. Nine out of 10 people who attempt to take their own lives do not die during that acute period of crisis, and do not go on to die of suicide in the future. Research shows that most people who make one attempt do not try to end their own lives again.
But Lawal did try again. After her first attempt as a child, she tried to take her own life four more times, most recently in 2021.
Lawal survived. And today, after…
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