BALTIMORE — Nearly 1 in 10 Maryland high school students reported attempting suicide at least once in the year leading up to the fall of 2022, according to the latest results from a national survey administered every two years by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

An even greater share of students said they seriously considered attempting suicide (17.9%) or made a plan about how they would attempt suicide (14.3%), according to the Maryland Youth Risk Behavior Survey and Youth Tobacco Survey.

As alarming as those numbers are, they’re a marked improvement over the prior year when about 1 in 6 high schoolers said they had attempted to take their own life one or more times in the previous 12 months, a period when the coronavirus pandemic had closed most schools for in-person learning.

With such self-reported data, it can be difficult to understand what a child means when they say they have attempted suicide, said Dr. Gloria Reeves, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the University of Maryland Children’s Hospital and an associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

High schoolers answering the question could be thinking about self-harm behaviors they’ve carried out not because they wanted to die, but because they were dealing with overwhelming feelings of numbness, isolation or stress. They also could be thinking of suicidal ideation that they never acted upon, but felt so intense and scary that they label it as an attempt. Or they could be describing a time when they’ve actually tried to take their own life.

Either way, it’s something “we should all really pay attention to and think about at every level how we can better support children,” Reeves said. “At a family, community, school-level and nationally.”

The CDC sponsors Youth Risk Behavior and Youth Tobacco surveys in states across the country in an effort to surveil behaviors that contribute to the leading causes of death, disability and social challenges among children. Nearly 60,000 students in 368 public middle and high schools across Maryland participated in the latest version of the survey.

The survey administered to middle schoolers in Maryland in 2022 did not ask specifically about suicide, but roughly a third of students surveyed said they felt sad or hopeless.

While the most recent suicide data for high schoolers is striking, it represents the most significant improvement in suicide metrics in Maryland since they started being tracked by the survey in 2013. Since that year, the percent of students who reported seriously considering suicide or making a plan to do so has creeped upward in nearly every survey.

In 2021, the first year the survey asked students about suicide attempts, 17.3% of high schoolers said they had attempted to take their own life one or more times in the prior 12 months. Even more, 1 in 5, said they seriously considered suicide, and 15.4% said they made a plan for doing so.

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