In the U.S.,
Black children under the age of 13
are twice as likely to die
by suicide than white children.
- It felt like people were looking down on him,
so we buried him this high.
So when they had to come and see him,
they always had to look up.
And experts aren't entirely sure
why this deadly disparity is happening.
- Mental health does play a big part.
We need more support and awareness.
We gotta break the cycle.
Over the past decade,
suicide attempts among Black children rose 92%.
On January 19th of 2019,
10-year-old Seven Bridges was one of those children.
- Seven was a blessing to everybody that met him.
From the day he was born, he was always the star
and didn't know it.
Tami Charles is Seven's mother.
She alleges that physical abuse and racist slurs at school
harmed her son's mental state.
So throughout 2019, she used Facebook
to document her son's struggles.
I'm in the school, and
my son has been called a n*gg*r and a b*tch and choked.
Despite their visits to the school,
Tami and her husband, Donny, claim Seven's bullying continued.
They believed the bullying prompted Seven's suicide
after Tami found her son dead in his bedroom.
- I started CPR on my baby.
I did the proper compressions.
I breathed into his mouth, and I had been drinking coffee,
and as I began the compressions again,
I could smell the coffee come back out of his lungs.
I knew then that my son was dead.
As Tami sat at the hospital,
dealing with the aftermath of Seven's death,
she wanted only one thing.
I just wanna see him again before you take him,
before you do an autopsy,
before you embalm him.
Let me see my baby!
A 2019 study
found that children who died by suicide
were more likely to be Black and male.
Two years after her 11-year-old son's death,
Nataya Chambers is still searching for answers.
I dealt with mental health,
and I seen the signs in my son, and I didn't even know.
When my son passed away and hung himself,
I just couldn't believe it.
And I think, "How do they think of this, and how do they do it?"
Talk, mommy. Did you know our voice is changing? Yes, talk.
- Rylan was my best friend.
He was an honor roll student.
He was a basketball player.
He was a tutor for his school.
He was just a good, all-around perfect kid.
The study found that suicidal ideation,
which is when someone thinks about
or plans a suicide attempt,
decreased between 1991 and 2017
for children of all races.
But when researchers took a closer look
and surveyed children,
they found that suicide attempts
for Black kids rose 73%.
Experts suspect many factors,
including a relative lack of mental health care access.
In some cases,
there may be a link with abuse and trauma.
But the list goes on.
After all, there's no single cause for suicide.
Dr. Michael Lindsey is the leader of
the Emergency Taskforce
on Black Youth Suicide & Mental Health.
From a policy perspective,
we are doing what it takes
to get mental health professionals in every school.
Not just one professional, but
proportionate to the number of kids in a school.
The Congressional Black Caucus
originally tapped Dr. Lindsey
to head the taskforce in 2019,
in an effort to combat
the growing number of suicides among Black youth.
We need education campaigns.
We need those who have been impacted by the issues,
celebrities, or athletes, entertainers,
to speak openly about their struggles
and how they got connected to care.
We miss you, buddy.
Everybody misses you.
[crying]
Losing their sons
is one of the hardest things that will ever happen
to Tami and Nataya.
What makes it harder still
is that no one knows exactly why this is happening
to so many Black children like Seven and Rylan.
In the meantime, both mothers are trying to define
what it means to heal.
- I got his name on me.
I wanna get his face.
I miss my son so much.
For Tami and Nataya,
a part of their healing was creating organizations
that spread awareness and support parents
who've lost their children to suicide.
- I don't even know how I'm still here
telling my story. But I know this is my job.
This is what I gotta do.
If I can spare any parent
grieving, or any child, just one,
that would make me so happy.
That's what I really wanna do.
- People like me, the survivors,
the families and friends that suicide has touched our life,
and what do we do?
How do we move forward?
There's no right or wrong answer,
and there's no path to it,
but at least we can talk about it, together.
We lend our voice. We lend our hearts.
We lend our hugs.