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).