Suicide in Childhood.
Suicide, apart from lunacy, is the act of passion, or despair, and so far spares childhood, during which stage of life one is protected by others from care, and when the mind is not yet opened enough to feel the overwhelming tides of amatory, jealous, and other passionate feelings which the adult intellect has to struggle through, and perchance survive. It is very rare, also, for insanity to occur in a child before puberty, unless congenital, as imbecility.
Brierre de Boismont gives the ages of 4,595 suicides in Paris; amongst these were 77 children under fourteen years of age, 1·6 per cent.
From 1865 to 1874, in England, there were 81 suicides from ten to fourteen years of age, 45 male and 36 female; the ratio between these numbers shows female precocity. Child suicide is increasing in England and in almost all the continental states.
Childhood possesses a most highly sensitive mental organisation, coupled with a want of power to fully weigh the consequences of any act; but what undoubtedly causes many cases now is over-pressure in education; while the education itself produces precocious development of the reflective faculties, of vanity, and of the desires.
During the last few years there have been several English cases of children killing themselves, because unable to perform school tasks; yet it must be allowed that the most modern alteration in school life,─the abolition of corporal punishment,─has removed one fertile cause of suicide in childhood. See Ferrey and Collineau.
A writer in the Psychological Journal discusses 24 cases, 17 boys and 7 girls; of these children 1 was five years old, 2 nine, 2 ten, 5 eleven, and 7 twelve. All the girls drowned themselves.