The Real Pandemic: Childhood Suicides

Lockdowns: A Policy of Panic

The harms of these lockdown policies are well-documented: severe mental health deterioration, mass social unrest, health procedures deferred or foregone, soaring global poverty, increased suicide, extreme loneliness, and many others. Brad Polumbo recently testified before the US Senate on some of these dangers, noting that doctors across the world warn lockdowns have resulted in an “international epidemic” of child suicide.

Brad Polumbo recently testified before the US Senate on the Epidemic of Childhood Suicide

President Reagan was the one who stated that the most terrifying words that could be heard on this is earth are, “I’m here from the government and I’m here to help.”  Nearly everything the government attempts to do for a solution to a problem that it perceives, whether an actual problem or merely political theater, they only end up making the problem worse with their alleged solution.  The same has been true throughout the CONvid-1984 scamdemic/plandemic of 2020-2021, and it looks like the children are the ones who have been impacted the most.

Billions of people across the globe continue to live under COVID-19 lockdowns or heavily-restricted life. And for almost all of us, life amid the pandemic in 2020 was an isolating and difficult year. Yet doctors are warning that children in particular are experiencing grave mental health consequences as a result of the lockdowns—leading to an “international epidemic” of child suicide. 

The Associated Press interviewed Dr. David Greenhorn on the subject, who works in the emergency department at England’s Bradford Royal Infirmary. The number of mental health crises he has seen, such as suicide attempts, has gone from a couple per week pre-pandemic to now several per day.

PARIS (AP) — By the time his parents rushed him to the hospital, 11-year-old Pablo was barely eating and had stopped drinking entirely. Weakened by months of self-privation, his heart had slowed to a crawl and his kidneys were faltering. Medics injected him with fluids and fed him through a tube — first steps toward stitching together yet another child coming apart amid the tumult of the coronavirus crisis.

For doctors who treat them, the pandemic’s impact on the mental health of children is increasingly alarming. The Paris pediatric hospital caring for Pablo has seen a doubling in the number of children and young teenagers requiring treatment after attempted suicides since September.

Doctors elsewhere report similar surges, with children — some as young as 8 — deliberately running into traffic, overdosing on pills and otherwise self-harming. In Japan, child and adolescent suicides hit record levels in 2020, according to the Education Ministry.

Juvenile suicides in Japan hit record-high 479 in 2020

The annual number of juvenile suicides in Japan hit 479 in 2020, the highest figure since records began to be kept in 1980, education ministry data showed Monday.

Pediatric psychiatrists say they’re also seeing children with coronavirus-related phobias, tics and eating disorders, obsessing about infection, scrubbing their hands raw, covering their bodies with disinfectant gel and terrified of getting sick from food.

Also increasingly common, doctors say, are children suffering panic attacks, heart palpitations and other symptoms of mental anguish, as well as chronic addictions to mobile devices and computer screens that have become their sitters, teachers and entertainers during lockdowns, curfews and school closures.

“There is no prototype for the child experiencing difficulties,” said Dr. Richard Delorme, who heads the psychiatric unit treating Pablo at the giant Robert Debré pediatric hospital, the busiest in France. “This concerns all of us.”

Pablo’s father, Jerome, is still trying to understand why his son gradually fell sick with a chronic eating disorder as the pandemic took hold, slowly starving himself until the only foods he would eat were small quantities of rice, tuna and cherry tomatoes. 

Jerome suspects that disruptions last year to Pablo’s routines may have contributed to his illness. Because France was locked down, the boy had no in-school classes for months and couldn’t say goodbye to his friends and teacher at the end of the school year.

“It was very tough,” Jerome said. “This is a generation that has taken a beating.” 

Sometimes, other factors pile on misery beyond the burden of the 2.6 million COVID-19 victims who have died in the world’s worst health crisis in a century.

Islamic State extremists who killed 130 people in gun and bomb attacks across Paris in 2015, including at a cafe on Pablo’s walk to school, also left a searing mark on his childhood. Pablo used to believe that the cafe’s dead customers were buried under the sidewalk where he trod.

When he was hospitalized at the end of February, Pablo had lost a third of his previous weight. His heart rate was so slow that medics struggled to find a pulse, and one of his kidneys was failing, said his father, who agreed to talk about his son’s illness on condition they not be identified by their surname.

“It is a real nightmare to have a child who is destroying himself,” the father said. 

Pablo’s psychiatrist at the hospital, Dr. Coline Stordeur, says some of her other young patients with eating disorders, mostly aged 8 to 12, told her they began obsessing in lockdown about gaining weight because they couldn’t stay active. One boy compensated by running laps in his parents’ basement for hours each day, losing weight so precipitously that he had to be hospitalized. 

Others told her they gradually restricted their diet: “No more sugar, then no more fat, and eventually no more of anything,” she said. 

Some children try to keep their mental anguish to themselves, not wanting to further burden the adults in their lives who are perhaps mourning loved ones or jobs lost to the coronavirus. They “try to be children who are forgotten about, who don’t add to their parents’ problems,” Stordeur said.

Children also may lack the awareness of mental illness or the ability to voice their need for help and to make a connection between their difficulties and the pandemic.