Mary Lawal was 8 years old the first time she tried to take her own life.
Time has blurred the details for Lawal, now a 22-year-old psychology student at Prince George’s Community College. She doesn’t remember the circumstances that led up to her attempt — Did she have a fight with her parents? An argument with her siblings? — or how, as a child, she even knew suicide was possible. She has only a vague memory of feeling lonely and unlovable.
“I don’t think I had a full understanding of what I was doing,” she said.
In the last two decades, overall suicide rate s in the U.S. have risen by more than a third. They are also up for children ages 8 to 12 — especially among young girls. Nearly 1 in 10 Maryland high school students reported having attempted suicide at least once in the year leading up to fall of 2022, according to results from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey.
But there are reasons to be hopeful. For two years, in Maryland and across the country, the 988 suicide and crisis hotline has made it easier to ask for help. And earlier this month, U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin , a Maryland Democrat, introduced legislation that would create a federal grant program to support evidence-based models for stabilizing people with serious thoughts of suicide. Raskin lost his son to suicide in December 2020.