I just ran across someone remarking on the suicide crisis among teen girls and it immediately struck me as wrong. Didn't I just recently say that the suicide rate had grown about as much for both adults and teens?
Yes, but it turns out that's mainly because of men, whose suicide numbers are far higher than women and swamp the data. If you pull out women separately it looks like this:
Among women, the suicide rate has indeed gone up far more among teens than adults.
But note that the basic trend is still the same even when you look at men and women separately: the rise in suicide rates starts in 2007 and ends in 2017:
Among the youngest women, the sky-high annual growth rate from 1999-2017 suddenly slows to almost nothing after 2017.
What happened specifically from 2007-17 to cause this? Maybe nothing. The data is spiky, and it's possible the peaks and valleys don't mean much. For example, here's what I get by making slight changes to four data points:
Maybe the "real" underlying rate has been rising pretty smoothly from 2003 to now.
I don't know. The number of teen suicides among girls is about 500-1000 per year, which is bit too large of a sample size to think the data is noisy just by chance. Still, the absolute numbers that create the peaks and valleys are pretty small: around 50-70 deaths. It's not hard to argue that we shouldn't make too much of this.
If this sounds a bit muddled, it's because I kept looking at different views of the data while I was writing it. One thing that's clear, though, is that we've been on an upswing in suicides for the past two decades, and an especially large upswing among teen girls, who suddenly opened up a big gap from adult women in the three-year period from 2015-17. Feel free to speculate.
Any numbers on attempted suicides? Any change in how the suicide was committed?
IF there's been an increase in the use of guns in suicide attempts for women, then there may not be a change in the attempts, but that they have been more successful so to speak.
NPR did a story on this on Morning Edition this week, Tuesday I think. Basically our suicide rate is skyrocketing because it's too easy to kill yourself with a gun so folks with guns in the house are killing themselves but if the guns had been removed, they might have been able to ride out the bad patch via therapy and meds.
"Feel free to speculate."
What was that old Eddie Murphy joke from his SNL days about Ike Turner's autobiography? Oh yeah -- Wimmins Be Thinking Too Much.
I'm pretty sure it's social media.
😉
Women are more likely to use pills to attempt suicide than guns, which is why men have typically been far more successful at killing themselves. However, with the influx of fentanyl over the last decade, I suspect that death from overdoses have become far more common than they once were.
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