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Annotated Bibliography

Youth Suicide Is Growing. What Are We Doing About It?

Bailey Stephenson

Professor Malcolm Campbell

UWRT 1104

March 11, 2019

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American Psychological Association. American Psychological Association. 2019.

https://www.apa.org/index. Accessed 5 Mar. 2019.

This reliable website was created by the American Psychological Association. The APA

is the leading scientific and professional organization representing psychology in the

United States, with more than 118,000 researchers, educators, clinicians, consultants and

students as its members. Based on all the previous information, this source is reliable and

credible. The APA’s website is mostly about psychology and there are many different

tabs and pages you can look at. The Psychology Help Center tab is the one that I will be

using the most. There are two articles that I'm going to mostly focus on. “Coping After

Suicide Loss” and “How to Talk to Teens” both written by APA. In the first article, it

gives you different tips on how to cope with the loss of a person by suicide. This article

breaks it down into three different categories. The categories are “How to cope when a

friend or loved one dies by suicide”, “Talking to teens and children about death by

suicide”, and “Tips for school”. In these different categories, it gives helpful tips on how

to deal with a loss. It explains that you can’t blame yourself, you need to talk to people,

and you need to accept your emotions. It explains that when you are telling children or

teens you need to be honest, avoid rumors, and to deal with your own feeling first. When

talking to a school as a whole, you need to choose your words carefully and identify

students that will need more support. In the second article, it talks about how to talk to

teens about suicide. It breaks down the risk factors and warning signs of suicide such as

social withdrawal, a sudden drop in grades, an increase in the use of alcohol and drugs. It

also explains how to help a teen struggling with suicide, for example, express your

concern, be compassionate and really listen. This source gives me a lot of information
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about how to prevent suicide and how to help yourself and other individuals affected by

suicide. This source will definitely be used in my project because it gives me useful

information on certain aspects of youth suicide that I want to talk about.

Haelle, Tara. “Hospitals See Growing Numbers of Kids and Teens at Risk for Suicide.” NPR,

NPR, 16 May 2018.www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/05/16/611407972/hospitals-

see-growing-numbers-of-kids-and-teens-at-risk-for-suicide Accessed 5 Mar. 2019.

This is a developed article from a popular resource. Haelle is a freelance science and

multimedia journalist who specializes in reporting pediatric and maternal health,

parenting, public health, mental health, medical research, and the social sciences. Her

work has appeared in The New York Times, NPR, Scientific American, Medscape, Self,

the Washington Post. Based on her credentials and NPR credentials; this is a reliable

resource. This article talks about a study that was published. The lead author of the study

was Gregory Plemmons, a pediatrician, and researcher at Vanderbilt University. This

study found that children from ages 5 to 17 visited children’s hospitals for suicidal

thoughts or attempts about twice as often in 2015 as in 2008. One of the study’s findings

was a seasonal trend in hospital visits. There was a peak in mid-fall and mid-spring and

fell to the lowest point in the summer. Plemmons said, "We knew there was an

association with school seasons, but actually seeing that mapped out was surprising.”

This suggested that school correlates to youth suicide. The school puts a lot of pressure

on the youth and can cause them to become depressed or stressed, it drains the youth.

Plemmons also mentioned that social media plays a factor in it as well. "You're becoming

more disconnected and not having relationships with real people, and at the same time,

you're being fed a false distortion of what reality is, where everything looks great on-
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screen," he says. Dr. Laurel Williams, chief of psychiatry at Texas Children's Hospital in

Houston, addresses the first step anyone can take and that step is, "Asking a young person

how they are feeling, not just how they are doing, is essential. We need to give young

people the time and space to talk about how they are feeling. This involves developing

closer relationships over time, not something you can scramble at the last minute or only

in moments of crisis." That statement will be extremely useful to me during my project.

This article gives me multiple different statistics to use and a lot of information that is

backed up by the study. I have read a lot of articles about youth suicide but this one really

put me in awe. The statistics are sad. I will definitely be using this article in my project

because it gives me useful statistics and more details about youth suicide and how

common it is.

Patton, George C. “Youth Suicide: New Angles on an Old Problem.” Journal of Adolescent

Health, vol. 54, no. 3, Elsevier Inc., Mar. 2014, pp. 245–46, https://doi.org/10.1016/

J.jadohealth.2013.12.015. Accessed 5 Mar. 2019.

This peer-reviewed article. George C. Patton M.D. Patton is a group leader at the

Murdoch Children’s Research Institute. His research is based at the Centre for

Adolescent Health and the Murdoch Children's Research Institute. He has been

extensively involved in both child and adolescent mental health research and global

adolescent health work. His background shows he has experience in the adolescent

mental health field, I can definitely say that this a reliable source. In this article, he

examines why youth suicide still happens. The leading causes of death of a youth in the

US have shifted to suicide and violence over the past half a century. This article gives an

overview of suicide methods throughout different countries, how to prevent it and what
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leads youth to commit suicide. Patton explains that social and economic changes are one

of the main causes of youth suicide. Youth unemployment is decreasing and can affect

mental health. Social media can really affect someone’s mental health because of

cyberbullying and the negative things that are put up nowadays. He explains that

common suicide methods are shooting and poisons. Patton explains that there are

prevention strategies for poison and guns. Patton says that health care professionals will

still play a big role in the prevention of youth suicide by counseling the victim’s family

and friends, in advocacy regarding prevention, and pushing our understanding of youth

suicide. I chose this article because it gives me an overview of multiple different aspects

of youth suicide. My topic is on how we are going to help prevent youth suicide and how

it affects the community but also youth suicide as a whole because I feel that not many

people know exactly how common it really is. The source is very helpful because it gives

me details of before and during youth suicide. It gives details on why youth commits

suicide, how they do it and what we can do to prevent it. The source will 100% appear in

my project.