I want to highlight something I posted yesterday that might have gotten lost:
Up through 2014, teen suicide among girls was no different from suicide among adult women. Then, in 2015, it suddenly shot up, opening up a huge gap in only three years.
This is very unusual. Very often, when you see a sudden, sharp spike like this it means it's an artifact of some kind. That is, it's due to changes in record keeping or police reports or something like that, rather than an actual rise. I wonder if that's the case here?
I'm not aware of any kind of change in the collection of suicide statistics, or any change in how deaths are ruled a suicide. Still, this represents a 26% rise in the raw suicide rate over 36 months. That's a little hard to explain.
How is this not obvious?
Because no one seems to be noticing the suicide rate for teen girls is a third what the rate for boys is.
When you focus too much on the change and not enough to the rate.
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No one cares about men these days.
For $1000.
It is composed by two words that sounds like SoCal Medias, and which Kevin Drum absolutely refuses to consider as a negative influence on teens.
Would you like to explain why this factor didn't take effect earlier, and why it is disproportionately affecting girls?
With pleasure.
While Kevin focuses on the peak after 2015, in reality, you can see the trend started around 2007, same as the rate for adult women.
Take a look at the figure here:
https://ourworldindata.org/rise-of-social-media
Those suicide trends overlap extremely closely with the rise of Facebook and YouTube. Now look at all the other newer social media sites/apps (most of which cater primarily to teens). They all started to hit their stride around 2015. When you add these new media apps to the continually increasing use of FB and YT, you get the sharper rise now seen in teen suicide rates.
Those suicide trends overlap extremely closely with the rise of Facebook and YouTube
So social media was increasing suicide among women of all ages (including teens) until 2015 but starting that year it caused a surge only among teens? Seems unlikely.
But Solar explains it very well. Also the newer social media like TikTok are apparently (I never visited them) especially tuned to teens and also much more demanding of physical appearance.
Also as Solar points out the surge among teens already started in 2007, only becoming more marked in 2015.
2007 - 2015
FB and YT dominate the social media scene and the rate of suicides of both adult women and teen girls increases equally on par with the rise of these two platforms.
2015 - 2018
FB and YT users continues rising.
At the same time additional social media platforms appear and rise in popularity, most of which are particularly focused in grabbing the attention of teens.
The suicide rate of adult women keeps tracking with the increased users of FB and YT.
Teen girls suicide rates see a sharper increase compared to adult women because their trend line is the combination of FB and YT with the additional effect of newer social media platforms whose primary user base is teen girls.
Here it is in simple math terms
2007 - 2015
SRAW = (FB + YT)
SRTG = (FB + YT)
2015 - 2018
SRAW = (FB + YT)
SRTG = (FB +YT + other SM)
Is that clear enough?
In fairness, the suicide rate started taking off around 2007-08 (no one should discount the GFC as a factor). It only began to diverge from the rise in the adult rate around 2014-15.
While social media may have something to do with it, I find that's a rather pat and unpersuasive explanation of why more teen girls are killing themselves. Seems to me there's something else, and something more complex, going on.
Social media can act as a cultural accelerant. But what's going on in the culture? How is it changing? How is it different today than in earlier times (when let's admit it, the life of teenagers was still full of angst)?
Since the subject here is girls, the answer here likely has something to do with changing gender roles, expectations, social pressures, and so on. Is there a growing gap between girls and boys that somehow is leading to more desperation and despair among (at least some) girls?
I think the answer is yes, and the details there will offer a better explanation than simply "social media."
It's probably not that girls are more successful in school and are now the majority in college.
But it is interesting that at a time when girls and women are "succeeding" more than ever before, the suicide rate for teen girls is soaring. On the face of it, it doesn't make sense.
A 3:2 ratio (women:men) is common on college campuses. That's an imbalance that has consequences. Several of my nieces have expressed certain frustrations with the thinning pool of eligible men that are marriage-worthy. They're well-educated and successful women, in their mid- to later 30s, and in search of men who are doing as well or better. They didn't expect to be single this long, and don't want to be for life.
It's a different problem than what teen girls are dealing with. They have more options than in the past, but also more pressure to be all things. Expectations for guys are more likely to be in line with traditional norms, which can be sometimes problematical but is less confusing.
And it is compounded by an ideology that insists that a gender-distressed young female must be affirmed as a male or she will quite possibly commit suicide.
Thank you.
https://x.com/InezFeltscher/status/1781312879666327998
Thanks for waving your bigot flag! We all see you now.
Kevin, I have been commenting in your threads for twenty years. I transitioned almost thirty years ago.
Promoting somethingI dealt with extensively - suicidal ideation - is both not cool and very, very destructive.
But the recent Cass report found no change in suicide rates iirc.
I’m pro anything that increases suicide rates, anything that increases murder rates, anything that clears out idiots in large numbers is a-ok by me.
Why the focus on 2017? It looks like suicide among girls started picking up after 2007 and has barely let up since.
Girls have always been more likely to attempt suicide than boys, but boys succeed at it more often. Some of the rise could simply be related to increased availability of handguns.
Yeah.
women don't have to catch up to men in every area
I don't know what it was, but in 2018 my teenage daughter began showing signs of depression and had to be hospitalized in 2019. Many of her friends were equally freaked out.
It's brutal as a parent, but worse for the poor kids going through it.
You think she might be old enough now to have a conversation with about the problems that affected her as a teen?
The adult group is made up of a very wide age range. The suicide rate for women in their 20s probably looks very different than the rate for women in their 60s and 70s.
Grouping everyone over 19 together probably makes this more difficult to understand. Bad charting.
Instagram (anecdotally used disproportionately by teenage girls during that time period) went from 1 million users in December 2010 to 1 billion in June of 2018. I'm well aware of Kevin's take on that, and I'm no epidemiologist, but these two things seem like an awful coincidence.