A few weeks ago NBC News reported on a suicide crisis among Hispanics. What's the cause? A variety of the usual suspects:
The pandemic hit young Hispanics especially hard .... parents don’t speak English .... poorer households .... cultural barriers .... cultural and systemic obstacles .... minorities face added economic and societal obstacles .... may not receive culturally sensitive mental health screenings .... bias .... culturally taboo .... unstable living conditions.
You knew a chart was coming, didn't you? Here it is:
Since the start of the century, Hispanic suicide rates (a) have been consistently far lower than non-Hispanic rates, and (b) have grown at a slower pace than non-Hispanic rates. Ironically, though, this is consistent with all the lazy reasons tossed out in the NBC article, since these Hispanic obstacles have always been around.¹ Nothing changed about them in the past ten years, which is consistent with no special Hispanic change in suicide rates either.
Suicide is up among nearly all demographics in the US over the past 20 years. It's not clear why, nor is it clear if something new is happening or if rates are simply reverting to their past levels, which were quite a bit higher than today. It's easy to cherry pick specific years and demographics (Hispanics from 2012-2022) that show somewhat higher growth than usual, and then call it a crisis. And maybe it is. But probably not.
POSTSCRIPT: What's unfortunate about the NBC approach is that it makes no attempt to figure out what's really caused Hispanic suicide rates to increase over the past decade. Most likely it's just short-term statistical variance: non-Hispanic suicide rates grew faster in the aughts and Hispanic suicide rates caught up in the teens. But maybe that's not it. And if it's not, wouldn't it be nice to know where the rise is really coming from? Instead we get a bunch of standard race tropes that haven't changed over the years and therefore probably haven't caused any change. The real reason, which ought to be something that happened around 2012, is apparently of no serious interest.
¹The exception is the assertion that the pandemic hit young Hispanics especially hard, but this is presented with zero evidence.
Going to be a bit lazy intellectually on this but could it be more access to guns makes a successful suicide attempt more likely? https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2023/cdc-provisional-data-gun-suicides-reach-all-time-high-in-2022-gun-homicides-down-slightly-from-2021
As media criticism, I think it’s fine to point this out. But the post doesn’t draw that distinction. To the family and friends of a person who committed suicide this seems… unseemly. Can we just stop pretending that rates of some tragic event going up or down are entirely irrelevant?
The only good thing are dead people with the last name trump, last name kirshner, people who identify as republicans, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, convicted criminals, gun owners…
The only decent people are atheists! ????
That thing you're worried about (Latino/Hispanic suicide rates)? Kevin Drum thinks it's not a big deal.