by SAMBA DOUCOURE
On 29th September, psychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik handed a report to the government concerning children taking their own life. He believes that a number of fatal accidents are comparable to suicide.
In his report commissioned by the Ministry for Youth, Boris Cyrulnik stated that if “successful suicides are rare” in 5 – 12 year-olds, they are nevertheless “certainly more frequent than the official statistics indicate, since they count only obvious suicides”. The most recent figures from Inserm (the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research), published in 2009, showed 37 children and pre-teens aged from 5 to 14 years-old had committed suicide.
“In the majority of cases, the child leans too far out of a window or jumps off a moving bus. So adults think of it as an accident”. Amongst the motives which push children into becoming suicidal, Cyrulnik mentions teen-age stress, parental conflicts, abuse, lack of security at home and bullying at school. “The day when “insecure” children, all alone, without the possibility of sharing their suffering and with no help to understand what is happening to them, comes to understand what death is, they and let themselves be taken by it”, writes the psychiatrist.
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