Here is a mystery:
Attempted suicide among teens has stayed the same since 2000, but the number of successful suicides has gone up by a third. Why? Are teens getting better at committing suicide?
Maybe it's a problem with the data? The numbers for attempted suicide come from a survey and they show that about 10% of all teens attempt suicide. Can that really be true? 10%?
POSTSCRIPT: Also worth noting is that if these numbers are correct then only about 1 in 1,000 teen suicide attempts is successful.
POSTSCRIPT 2: Suicide by firearm is far more successful than any other form of suicide, so one reason for the increase in successful suicides might be increased access to guns. However, the number of gun-owning households hasn't changed during the period when teen suicides rose:
There is nonetheless some evidence that firearm suicide among teens has grown at a faster rate than non-firearm suicide. But we don't know why.
Back in the day, people just ignored teens crying out for help but now the schools immediately refer the teen into a residential facility (ie “nice jail”)? And the kids know this so they hide how they feel better until they are sure their plans to kill themselves will work?
Can you list your evidence for this claim?
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Isn't it well known that suicide attempts with guns are far more deadly than other forms? This is a probably a function of guns being more available to teens and more guns being used in attempts. I am sure there is data about suicide attempt form (guns vs pills vs knives vs hanging etc) over time.
Yes, use of guns results in more completed suicides and thus fewer attempts. Other complicating factors are that boys are more likely to complete suicide than girls, perhaps because of greater access to guns or greater knowledge of how to effectively commit suicide. This has also been chalked up to girls being histrionic and thus not sincere in their suicide attempts, but that sounds sexist to me. Kevin Drum tends not to look at gender differences in his graphs but they are relevant to this topic.
I also wonder whether some fentanyl deaths are being inconsistently classified as suicides or vice versa. Given that fentanyl is more deadly than previous substance use, perhaps more suicide attempts using fentanyl are resulting in death than previous deliberate overdoses using other substances.
https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2023-05-01/suicide-rates-among-u-s-adolescents-doubled-in-10-years
A survey means the data is self-reported and not collected from actual events, but completed suicide rates are still very low (1-2 out of 100,000) despite having doubled.
A big difference between boys and girls is the method of suicide. Boys use guns, hanging, or jumping off something, which kill instantly. Girls use drugs or cutting, which don't.
This is my guess as well.
If the attempts rate is correct then the success rate of attempts is 0.1% (one in a thousand). That doesn't seem like the attempts were very serious if they actually occurred.
Most likely this is another case of survey or poll replies having little relation to reality. Police or whoever responded to the successful suicides (or 911 records?) might have some idea of how many unsuccessful attempts there really are.
more guns?
Fentanyl?
Or given that the percentage that succeeded is still really low it’s not a statistically significant difference?
The supposed 11% rate of attempts means millions per year. If these were serious enough to result in some kind of official response there should be real statistics somewhere.
All suicide attempts are serious. Even just suicidal ideation is serious.
More guns = higher “success” rate.
"The number of children and teens killed by gunfire in the United States increased 50% between 2019 and 2021, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of the latest annual mortality statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)."
"The United States has by far the highest rate of child and teen firearm mortality among peer nations. In no other similarly large, wealthy country are firearms in the top four causes of death for children and teens, let alone the number one cause."
Usually massive changes in small numbers, like this, result from a redefinition.
The largest cause of death in this age range is accidents. It only takes reclassifying a small number of “accidents” as suicides, or vice versa, to move the numbers substantially. And there are always, constantly shifting, social/political pressures to move uncertain cases (car crash? overdose? drowning? even “unintentional discharge of a firearm”) in one direction or another.
If "why is teen suicide up, but attempted suicide isn’t" is the right question, then it is a means to an end where the end is insight into understanding why teen suicide or attempted teen suicide is going up and not down. But I'm not sure I see how it serves that end.
The way I see it, there are two mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive responses to conflicting ways of explaining evidence. Wisdom is the willingness to subject the different ways to an equal measure of rigorous skepticism, and then draw an evidence-based conclusion. Ignorance is the willingness to jump to a conclusion and then look for evidence to confirm and defend that conclusion.
I use that principle to evaluate the other comments.
The successful suicide rate and the unsuccessful suicide rate are both directly proportional to ignorance and inversely proportional to wisdom. Thus, if either rate is going up, and neither is going down, then ignorance, and not wisdom, is going up.
FYI, ignorance is for a small short-term gain while ignoring the large long-term pain, whereas wisdom is for a large long-term gain at the expense of a necessary but relatively small short-term pain.
Drum says the number of gun-owning households has not increased. That isn’t true over the time from 2004 onward when youth suicides began drmatically increasing and they have greatly increased again since covid from 2019. Also there are twice the rate of suicides in rural areas compared to urban areas along with more guns in rural areas.
Astonishingly gruesome if true:
"Attempted suicide among teens has stayed the same since 2000, but the number of successful suicides has gone up by a third. Why? Are teens getting better at committing suicide?"
I wonder if teens might be the only ones who could answer that question. It is, of course, the oldest of clichés to comment on a generation gap, but not every overused perspective completely lacks insight or relevance.
And my own reading, plus some of my own anecdotal experience, leads me increasingly to believe that we may currently be looking at more than a typical generation gap. A few years ago, the Atlantic Mag asked, "Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?" And others, like Jonathan Haidt, have been banging on more or less the same drum incessantly.
Seemingly typical behaviors and values that current adults (more or less) took for granted, like getting a driver's license and asserting one's independence, are less common.
New technologies enable unprecedented childhood landscapes in which the real world contracts and the online world of social media, gaming, texting, chatting, liking, and, of course, canceling expand into relatively new and uncharted territories.
"Old school" professors (older than maybe 40 years old) report one story after another of students who seem to belong to a wholly different culture, one that the professors just aren't familiar with and in which their academic values of open inquiry are treated like violent threats.
If the past is a foreign country, and they do things differently there, modern adults may as well be living on the other side of the world from their younger cohorts.
And that may leave us in a weak position to diagnose so serious a malady as suicide among those foreign denizens in our midst. We might require the services of an anthropologist to investigate that strange and incomprehensible culture.
Experience matters.
When it comes to suicide, gun type and gun storage practices matter. Long guns are not ideal for suicides (there's a reason the US is so accomplished at face transplants).
We've seen massive increases in handgun ownership and a movement toward having guns for personal safety instead of hunting. That means more loaded handguns where teens can easily get them. Suicide is often an impulsive act, so increased access to loaded handguns can play a major role.