This piece contains in-depth discussion of the prevalence of suicide among young people.
In May 1212, 12-year-old Stephen of Cloyes announced to the world that Jesus Christ had authorised him to organise a crusade to the Holy Land. He drew crowds of children with him, all traveling south. Most of them were boys from peasant families, but there were also some sons of the nobility. Some had run away from home, others had left with the family’s blessing. A group of girls and a number of young priests and adult pilgrims also joined them.
Stephen persuaded at least 3,000 children to take part in the crusade, although some sources say it may have been as many as half a million. Many of them died on the way due to hunger and the extreme heat. When they reached Marseilles, the sea did not part as Stephen had prophesied, and so some of the discouraged participants returned home. As for those who remained, a cunning merchant offered to transport them to the Holy Land in his seven ships. Two of them sank, and the passengers of the other five were sold into slavery to the Saracens.
When news of Stephen’s crusade reached Germany, shortly after it set out, Nicholas of Cologne gathered an army of local children ready to go south. This was a significantly smaller group, numbering “only” 12,000. When they reached the shore, the sea refused to part for them too. They decided to wander on until they reached the place where the miracle was prophesied to take place. A few returned, but the others were never heard of again.
Epidemic of suicides
The history of the Children’s Crusades is invaluable as the pretext for a thought experiment which can provide us with a better insight into the present. After all, as the universal but irrefutable wisdom has it, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. So, let us consider a few questions: why did children go on crusades in the 13th century? Why were there no such crusades either earlier or later in our history? Why did those crusades start from France and Germany, and not from, say, Poland or Scandinavia? Why aren’t they happening today? And the most important question: what social elements in play at the beginning of the 13th century should be eliminated to prevent such tragic crusades?
More than 800 years after the Children’s Crusades, we are experiencing what we have generally come to call an epidemic of suicide among children and adolescents. Three decades ago, the gravest public health threats to teenagers in the United States came from binge drinking, drunk driving, teenage pregnancy and smoking. These have since fallen sharply, replaced by a new public health concern: soaring rates of mental health disorders and suicide attempts. For people aged 10 to 24, suicide rates, stable from 2000 to 2007, leaped 57.4% from 6.8 per 100,000 in 2007 to 10.7 in 2018. Between 2007–2009 and 2016–2018, suicide rates increased significantly in 42 states. In the 10 years leading up to the Covid pandemic, suicidal thoughts and behaviours increased by about 40% among young people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A study published in 2023 found that 22% of teenagers had considered attempting suicide in the past year, of which female students accounted for more than twice the attempts by male students.
This epidemic of suicide is not just an American problem. In Europe, suicide is the second most common cause of death among adolescents aged 15 to 19. Tragically, almost 1,200 children and adolescents aged 10 to 19 end their own lives every year, which is an estimated three lives per day lost to suicide in Europe.
A record number of suicide attempts by children and adolescents was noted in Poland in 2022. The number of suicide attempts in this country has been growing significantly since 2013 (except for 2020). However, the recent increase is shocking. While in 2020 there were 843 suicide attempts made by children, in 2021 this figure was as high as 1,496. It is interesting to note that the number of suicide attempts ending in death has been decreasing at the same time. Just for an example, in 2013, 148 children killed themselves, while in 2020 the figure was 107. An increase was again recorded in 2021, when the figure rose to 127.
Disturbingly, the number of suicide attempts in 2020 by children aged seven to 12 was 29, but in 2021 this figure had increased to 51. Currently, about 6% of deaths among children and adolescents under the age of 18 are suicides. Fortunately, in the zero to six age group, there have been no recorded suicide attempts resulting in death since 2013, although psychologists report that recently children aged as young as six have begun to report suicidal thoughts.
It is difficult to obtain reliable historical data which could be used for comparison, but the few studies that appeared at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and later, before World War II, show that these numbers were significantly lower, at least in Europe. However, it is worth noting that the phenomenon of suicide among children and adolescents, although not as intense as it is currently, has always been an element of social reality. The increase in these depressing indicators is accompanied by an increasing number of studies whose authors are looking for possible reasons for this state of affairs, as well as ways to counteract these unfavourable trends.
Depressing marketing
Among the reasons for suicide among young people, the most commonly cited are lack of support from parents, domestic violence, ridicule by peers, drugs, debts, being confined within four walls, and problems with sexual orientation. Of course, most cases are complex, and their causes arranged in various configurations. Following identification of the causes, suggestions for solutions and prevention begin to multiply. Family, school, and the health service are made responsible for them, and a psychologist working with children from the earliest years, and improvement (even reform) of psychiatric care are frequently proposed as solutions.
At this point, it is worth returning to the Children’s Crusades, remembering, however, that they serve as an analogy, not a homology. From time immemorial, children and young people have left their homes, either going it alone or in the company of similar people in search of a desired goal. However, never in history have they done so en masse, as they did during the Children’s Crusades. Similarly, for centuries those most at odds with the reality surrounding them have taken their own life, although probably never on the same scale we are dealing with today.
For those born to the peasant families of the 13th century, communication with parents was not at a higher level than it is today, domestic violence went completely unpunished, a young person’s peers would have been merciless in regard to any differences among them – yet these were not the reasons that caused French and German children to leave their homes in großen Mengen.
If you have considered the answers to the questions posed earlier, you have surely come to the conclusion that the Children’s Crusades would never have taken place at all if they had not been organised by adults. However, this alone would not be enough if it were not supplemented by the encouragement and approval of the foremost authorities for this type of action. Preeminent figures in such crusades were venerated, and legends created around them. Eliminate those factors, and no children’s crusade would ever take to the road.
It is precisely because these causes are absent from the present environment that children nowadays so rarely follow peer group prophets in searching for doom. This is also why children in other parts of the world have not dreamed exclusively of liberating Jerusalem from the hands of infidels. Although today it is difficult to determine, it can certainly be assumed that, without eliminating these basic factors, any preventive measures would not bring much of a result.
The culture in which today’s children live is permeated with a grim, thoughtless marketing of depression and suicide. Throughout history, have there ever been similar situations like the one that took place in Poland when, during a public demonstration, a celebrity journalist wore a tee-shirt with images of five LGBT suicides in order to pay tribute to them and honour their memory? Have universally accessible magazines, electronic media, television, and radio ever been so often drawn to the issue of suicide? Have we ever had such direct access to information about the suicide of famous people on social media? Have there ever been as many public predictions of an increase in suicide rates as there were during the recent pandemic and immediately after it? Has the entertainment industry ever released so many films glorifying suicide in the past without opposition?
Self-fulfilling prophecies
The practice of getting used to the most risky options is recognised in the psychology of decision making. Those whose task it is to consider various alternatives reject the extremely risky or ridiculous ones as outliers from the outset. However, if you persuade people to talk about them, to analyse the pros and cons, and to reflect on them frequently, their tendency to choose these options increases noticeably. It is no different with thoughts of suicide.
Research shows that an increase in the number of suicides doesn’t only occur after the media publicise the suicide death of someone well known, in accordance with the so-called Werther effect. A team of Austrian and German psychologists, psychiatrists and communication specialists, who conducted an extensive analysis of nearly 500 press reports devoted to suicide, showed that the likelihood of more frequent suicides is also increased by articles containing objective expert opinions and epidemiological facts related to the phenomenon. At least several dozen – sometimes even several hundred – such publications appear in the world’s media every week. Many of them do not meet the requirements of the Reportingonsuicide.org agreement respected by major schools of journalism and associations of journalists across the world.
These requirements are also not met by the media statements of therapists forecasting an increase in the number of suicides, and frightening everybody with their prognoses. Repeating that ignoring depression can lead to suicide and continuing to publish similar statements may help to drive alarmed patients into the consulting rooms of therapists, but by all measures it is detrimental to the prevention of suicidal behaviour.
Absolute exceptions include such media reports that may trigger the so-called Papageno effect, i.e. a decrease in the number of suicides. This Werther-opposing, lesser-known effect is named after one of the characters in Mozart’s The Magic Flute – Papageno. Disappointed in love, he determines to take his own life, but he is dissuaded from this by a conversation with three young boys who show him alternative ways to solve his situation. Showing suicide in the right perspective can prevent it, as was also confirmed by the studies mentioned earlier.
There is no simple recipe to reverse cultural trends once they have been initiated, but there is a simple recipe to consolidate and deepen them. It is enough to continue what has already been started – publish as many alarming statistics as possible, together with the statements of specialists commenting on them, reports of suicides of children and adolescents, catastrophic forecasts, and series popularising death by one’s own hand.
If the media image created in this way is embellished from time to time by a celebrity idealising suicide and placing its victims in the role of martyrs worthy of admiration, we have a chance to witness another crusade on the same scale as that in the 13th century, because those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. However, if the majority do not shake themselves free from these trends, those who have learned from it will nonetheless be doomed to stand by helplessly and watch as everyone around them repeats it.
Tomasz Witkowski’s essay collection Recipe for a 21st-Century Children’s Crusade. Essays on Culture, Science, and Psychology, published by Universal Publishers in September 2025, is available now.
