Child Suicide: Race and Ethnicity

Child Suicide: Race and Ethnicity

Note: this is part of the Youth Suicide Rise project.

Race

The child population in the CDC 1999-2017 database is about 75% White, 15% Black, 5% Asian and 2% Native American.  Suicide rates are about 10 per million for Black and Asian children, 17 per million for White children, and (disturbingly) 31 per million for Native American children.

Consequently, 83% of child suicides in 1999-2017 were committed by White children.

Ethnicity

Hispanic children constitute nearly 22% of the population, an ethnicity that is mostly White (90%) yet has considerably lower suicide rates (roughly 10 per million); the ratio of suicide rates for non-Hispanic versus Hispanic Whites is about 1.5 to 1.

Sex and Race or Ethnicity

White and Black boys commit suicide about 2.7 times more often as girls, whereas the ratio is about 1.9 among Asians and 1.7 among Native Americans.

Among Hispanics, about twice as many boys as girls commit suicide.

Age and Race or Ethnicity

Black preteen children kill themselves slightly more often than White preteen children, but White teenagers kill themselves considerably more often than Black teens.  White boys commit a somewhat larger portion of male child suicides (83%) than the portion (76%) of female child suicides committed by White girls.

Other than that, there seem to be no surprises in age patterns related to race or ethnicity, including sex.

Notes:

Native American children who are Hispanic have far lower suicide rates than non-Hispanic Native American children (about 4 versus 48 per million).  In concrete numbers: of the 739 child suicides (1999-2017) among Native Americans, only 39 were Hispanic even though Hispanics compromise nearly 40% of this racial group.  This is unlikely to be a mere statistical anomaly, since Hispanic Native American children number over half-a-million.

Since our concern is the recent rise of child suicide rates, we will not always analyze aspects of child suicide that can be important in other regards but are statistically too small to have explanatory power in relation to the doubling of rates.  For example, we will not investigate much deeper the suicide rates of sexual minorities and certain racial minorities (such as Native Americans), even though such analyses can be of great importance to both researchers and practitioners in relation to many other aspects of child suicide.

Technical Note:

The so-called Mekko chart would have been preferable for the "Percent of Population and Suicides by Race" graph, but there seems to be no way to produce such a chart in LibreOffice -- if anyone knows of a way, please let me know.