“They didn’t raise their hand and say this out loud, but they would come up to one of us and whisper in our ear their own personal tragedy,” Doig says. “Many times, it was suicide. Their child, their sister, their brother. I had one woman at a Rotary meeting come up and say, ‘Two weeks ago, I tried to kill myself. And if it wasn’t for Rotary, I wouldn’t be here.’”
Testaments like that shored up the trio’s commitment to an audacious goal: raising half a million dollars to fund the education of pediatric mental health specialists.
That number wasn’t even on the table in early 2021, when Murthy heard about the crisis from a speaker at the Highlands Ranch club. Among the most chilling developments, hospitals were seeing younger and younger patients come into their emergency rooms after attempting suicide.
“We’re seeing rising rates in the 5- to 9-year-old population, if you can believe it,” says Dr. K. Ron-Li Liaw, Children’s Hospital Colorado’s first-ever mental health in-chief. “Elementary school-age kids are making suicide attempts.”
A few months after the hospital declared its state of emergency, three pediatric organizations declared one at the national level. Experts aren’t entirely sure what’s driving the crisis but point to a range of causes. The pandemic isolated kids and subjected many to the trauma of losing loved ones. More than 140,000 children in the United States lost a primary or secondary caregiver or both in the first 15 full months of the pandemic.
But the number of kids attempting suicide has been on the rise for years. Between 2016 and 2022, children’s hospitals saw a 166 percent increase in emergency department visits for suicide attempts and self-injury among children ages 5-18. That’s partly because there simply aren’t enough doctors to treat troubled youths before their mental health problems become severe, says Dr. Cassie Littler, president of the Colorado chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics. The U.S. has only 14 child and adolescent psychiatrists per 100,000 youths, and 70 percent of counties have no such professionals at all.
“It would make a big difference if we had behavioral health providers in pediatricians’ offices,” Littler says. “Changing how we fund prevention would go a long way, because then we could intervene and help children and families gain those coping mechanisms and problem-solving skills.”
