For reasons best left unexplored, I got curious about long-term suicide rates last night and ended up going down a rabbit hole. What I discovered is that everyone is doing it wrong.
Most of the charts you see are based on reports written decades ago plus CDC figures for the past couple of decades. The problem is that these use different methodologies and aren't comparable. However, in 2009 some researchers at the National Center for Health Statistics went back to the original worksheets for death rates and recalculated everything using the current standard. This is available in a series of reports for 1900-1998, while the CDC's WONDER database (as usual) can be used to fill in the figures for 1999-2021. Here it is:
After two decades of slowly rising, the US suicide rate has stabilized over the past few years. It is now at the same level as the 1950s.
UPDATE: The original version of this post had a mistake in recent suicide rates. They haven't gone down, only stabilized. The chart and the text have been corrected.
POSTSCRIPT: Here is the specific methodology used:
1900-1998: Age-adjusted death rates were calculated using the year 2000 standard using the following source documents: age-specific death rates from unpublished worktables from CDC/National Center for Health Statistics, National Vital Statistics System, Mortality data; data from the Special Reports (1956) publication; and electronic data tapes.
1999-2021: Data were analyzed using National Vital Statistics System multiple cause-of-death mortality files. Suicide deaths were identified using International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision underlying cause-of-death codes U03, X60–X84, and Y87.0. Age-adjusted death rates were calculated using the direct method and the 2000 U.S. standard population.
Interesting. I thought I would see a rise in suicide concurrent with the run up in gun sales since 2004 but the recent fall off in suicide would seem to contradict that assumption. % of households with firearms is meta stable in the +/1 40s% range over the period from 2000 to the present so the increase in the number of firearms (probably mostly going to repeat buyers) may not be significant factor in the suicide rate.
Hum, does this count risky behavior or deaths of dispair?
Seems like a difficult thing to count when I think about it.
Just eyeballing that graph, it looks as if suicide rates are somewhat associated with economic downturns, or the unemployment rate. Is that true?
Yes. The unemployment rate is pretty consistent with its connection to suicide rates.
The recent downturn in suicides seems to match the pandemic. Is this due to folks dying from covid that might have otherwise committed suicide?
Or that workplace pressures factor heavily into suicide.
Looks like the measures to provide financial security initiated by the New Deal and beyond had a lasting effect on reducing suicide rates in the USA.
My mother had an aunt who committed suicide in the 1930s by gassing herself in an oven when her favorite radio soap opera was cancelled, which made my mother paranoid of soap operas for the rest of her life.
Maybe Covid and isolation — staying at home much more than before — promoted (and gave space for) a re-evaluation of priorities, which led to moving to a better place, quitting high-stress jobs, getting a pet, etc.
I don't know enough history to speculate, but I'm curious about the sharp rise from 1900 to about 1909, then the high level until arooun 1915, with a sharp drop. The Great Depression certainly stands out.
I was curious about that early 1900s level as well.
Suicide rates dropped in the UK when coal gas (CO + H2) was replaced with methane, or so I've read. This might have happened in parts of the US as well.
Thank you for turning an unknown unknown into a known known.
Nothing like war to tamp suicides?!
The rates early in the Twentieth Century are absurd. Suicide soared during Teddy Roosevelt's "Progressive" era, stayed high until the US entered World War I and then PLUMMETED? Give me a break; who were all these people killing themselves during that period?
The rate then soared again during the "Roaring Twenties" when seemingly every picture from that era shows young people grinning from ear to ear as they do "The Charleston".
That they continued soaring during the Great Depression might indeed have been true, but the rate should be from a lower base. There were a lot of deaths somehow incorrectly attributed to suicide before 1930.
This begs the question, "Were spouses murdering each other at a terrible rate?" during that period, and it was covered up? Or was bad jim's observation that coal gas was killing people with carbon monoxide poisoning to blame?
Ah yes, the amateur historian intent on anachronizing the past, which must have been exactly like the present, and with the concerns of the present...
It was only in 1920 that 50% of the US lived in cities. Those on farms had a very different set of experiences that were governed essentially by issues like the rise and fall of produce prices, not the politics of city folk (capital/labor battles, slums, votes for women, pure food and drugs, and the rest of the Progressive agenda). Maybe the anti-trust stuff had some effect on their lives? Maybe not.
Farms seem consistently to result in substantially more suicide than cities. This remains true in the US today; but a striking example can be seen in China where the suicide rate dropped by ~half in the 25 years after 1990, and this seems primarily to have been driven by people moving from the farm to the city.
The awfulness of the Fifties and the Bush II years really leaps out at you, doesn't it...