May 06, 2017 11:19 AM EDT By Chris Brandt, UniversityHerald Reporter

Suicide is not just happening among adults and teens but also among children as young as five years old. What's more alarming is that the number has doubled in less than a decade.

According to a new research, the number of children admitted to hospitals due to serious self-harm and suicide has been steadily increasing from 2008 to 2015. The age of these kids is between 5 and 17 with the highest suicide occurrence among teenage girls.

Dr. Gregory Plemmons, presenter of the study and an associate professor of pediatrics at Monroe Carell Jr. Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt, said that they have observed that most of the children admitted to hospitals are not because of diabetes or pneumonia but because of suicide.

Because of that, Plemmons and his colleagues conducted a study and they have confirmed that the number has doubled over the last ten years. They got the data from 32 hospitals across the country and found out that 118,363 children between the ages of 5 and 17 had been diagnosed with serious self-harm and being suicidal.

Out of the reported number of cases, 13 percent are between the ages of 5 and 11 while around 37 percent were between the ages of 12 and 14. The rest - which is around 59,000 - were between 15 and 17 years old.

Between 2008 and 2015, the rate has increased from 0.67 percent to 1.79 percent. The researchers also mentioned that this rate increases every year - 0.27 percent in the 15 - 17 age bracket, 0.25 percent in the 12 - 14 bracket, and 0.02 percent in the 5 - 11 age bracket.

Another significant observation was that more girls attempt to commit suicide but the suicide success rate is higher among boys. The suicide rate also increases when school starts and at the lowest in July.

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