Youth Suicide Rise: Articles Index

Youth Suicide Rise: Articles Index (In Progress)

This is the current list of planned and completed posts in the Youth Suicide Rise (YSR) project. Titles and subtitles are tentative. Content gets continually updated.  If any of the text below seems a bit cryptic now, it should make sense once the relevant article is written.

Please read first the statement of purpose for The Shores of Academia site.

Preliminaries:

Youth Suicide Rise: Introduction

Proposed Explanations in the News Media: a Recent Sample

Prevention and the Youth Suicide Rise Project

Call for Participation: Youth Suicide Research Forum?

Suicide Data:

Child Suicides Double in a Decade

The Rise: Rate Fluctuation

The Rise: Rate Anomalies

The Rise In Historical Context

Child Suicide: Age and Sex

Child Suicide: Race and Ethnicity

Child Suicide: non-Hispanic White Teen Children

Child Suicide: Regionality and Rurality

Child Suicide in Context of Adult Suicide

The Rise: Age Trends

The Rise: Boys and Girls

The Rise: Sex and Age

The Rise: Sex Ratio Trend

Female Share of Youth Suicides

The Rise: Race and Ethnicity

The Rise: Regions and Rurality

The Rise: Suicide Methods (Boys)

The Rise: Suicide Methods (Girls)

The Rise: Demographics

The Rise: Tween Suicide Trends

The Rise: Teenage Cohorts

The Rise: Excess Deaths by Child Age

The Rise and Adult Suicide

Millennial Changes in Child and Adult Suicide

Childhood Trauma and Youth Suicide Rates

Youth Suicide: Adult versus Peer Influence

Youth Suicide: Cumulative Adult Influence

Childhood Trauma: Adult Fatal Injuries

The Rise and Child Suicide Stigma

Suicide and Homicide Rates

Homicide and M/F Suicide Ratio

Suicide and Male Violence: Plausibility Model

The Rise: Illusion or Reality?

Early Teens:  Why parts of the data require caution
CDC: Suffocation and Intent

Girls and Boys: Implications of Differing Rates
baselines, normal distribution, fallacies

Kids and Adults: Age Groups Comparisons

Age Cohorts: Time after Time

Parenting Generations: Suicide, Drug Overdoses, and Other Death Data

Demographics, Geography, Urbanization, Seasonality

International Data and Comparisons

Homicide, Accidents, and Suicide: Partly Complimentary?

Data and Causality

Warning: Suicide and Causality
Do not conflate risk factors with causes of suicide
Triggers and motivations versus volition
Scientific and social objectivity

Statistical vs Probabilistic vs Deterministic Causation
the absence of X, math game odds and primes

Data and Math: When Linear Relationships Have Nonlinear Effects

Data and Math: Family Influence Amplification
multiple family members, two parents two eyes

Intermediate Factors:

Suicide and Suicidality: Needles in a Haystack?
Are Teen Suicide Attempts Safer Than Pregnancies?

Suicide and Mental Health: Trend Similarities and Differences
Depression: Destructive or Protective?
 Stress and Anxiety: Worrying about Measures
Insomnia Nation: Sleep and Suicide

The 2007 Recession: The rapid rise and slow fall of economic stress

Proposed Explanations:

Are Suicide Attempts Getting More Lethal?
Has Firearms Access Increased Teen Suicide Rates?

Social Media and Smart Phones: the Evil Twins or the Twin Scapegoats?
Why both the theory and its negation are plausible
Bad science: correlation and causality, bad models and effect sizes

Bullying and Cyberbullying: Blaming the Kids
When data cease to matter
Bullycide: How news media distort reality

Child Maltreatment and The Opium Epidemic: The Neglected Hypothesis

Pop Psychology: The Extraordinary Ordinary
Scholastic Stress: Academic pressures and  standardized testing
Fatal Protection: Spoiled kids, bulldozer parents, and the cuddled mind

Black Box Warnings: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Effect Hypotheses

Antidepressants and Teen Suicide: Lost in the Dark

Media Contagion: Dead Kids as Celebrities

Religion: God and Suicide

Social Contagion: Family and Peer Suicides

The Body: Obesity and Puberty
contraception and depression

The Teen Taboo: Less Sex Less Happiness?

Suicide Indoctrination: The Message that Hurt Feelings Kill

Possible Speculations:

EMF (reduced melatonin etc. )
Nutrition (junk food etc. )
Environmental poisoning (pesticides, plastics, etc.)

Notes: 

The category Possible Speculations is meant for issues that might be relevant but where I have yet to encounter sufficient data and theory to justify discussing the matter of plausibility.  Further investigation and future developments might change this status of a particular factor.

Thanks to John Ackerman (Nationwide Children's Hospital) for noticing that I (inexplicably) omitted to mention the (crucial) section on international data.

Question: Are there any proposed explanations (worth investigating) missing from the list?

Youth Suicide Rise: Introduction

Youth Suicide Rise: Introduction

This post is related to the Youth Suicide Rise project

One of the paramount research problems of this decade in social sciences has been the issue of steadily increasing rates of youth suicide. Between 2007 and 2017, the teen suicide rate has nearly doubled; more than doubled for both female and younger teens.

A long-term project on this site will be a critical review of the efforts to explain these increases in youth suicides. One motivation for such a review is that some frequently proposed hypothesis lack plausibility while others, despite being deserving consideration, are largely neglected.

For example, bullying and more specifically cyberbullying has been ceaselessly proposed to be among the culprits, despite available data contradicting any notion that either has been on the rise among kids. On the other hand, family dysfunction has been seldom mentioned as a possible factor, despite data indicating increasing maltreatment of children as well as a growing impact of the opioids epidemic on families.

Another reason for this review is that some hypothesis -- for example the role of social media and smart screens -- are at times being prominently defended as well as opposed by severely flawed arguments.

As this endeavor will involve many articles over the course of many months, it is the intent of this post to declare a few underlying principles.

Evidence and Plausibility

When evaluating the plausibility of an explanation, we will examine two requirements:

A) Ecological Correlation

For a factor X to explain the doubling of suicide rates -- or, more realistically, at least a substantial part of the increase -- the relevant changes in X must be large enough to affect suicide so strongly in such a short time.

For example, the percentage of kids living with two parents has been fairly constant for a decade, so blaming the doubling of teen suicides on single-parent families is not plausible.

There is one important caveat when considering ecological correlation: the 2007 recession may have affected teen suicide between 2008 and 2011, and so we should allow some flexibility regarding the initial increases of teen suicides.

B) Credible Theory

We also require a plausible theory to explain how changes in X affect suicide rates.

For example, there have been dramatic declines in TV watching as well as cigarette smoking among teens, but there appears to be no sensible theory as to how either of these declines could have doubled suicide rates.

We will not demand evidence supporting the proposed mechanism, as such data may be difficult to obtain. We will, however, require consistency of the proposed theory -- including its implications -- with available data.

Community Effort

It is my hope that readers will not hesitate to provide advice and corrections in the comments or by email.

Notes:

Data regarding suicide rates as well as bullying, child maltreatment, and the opium epidemic will be discussed in later articles.

For prevalence rates of children living in single-parent households see data from Kidscount.

For declines in teen smoking and TV watching, see the YRBS survey 2007 results versus the 2017 results: watching TV three or more hours declined from 35% to 21% (QN81/QN80) while smoking decreased from 20% to 9% (QN30/QN32).