Child Suicide: Regionality and Rurality

Child Suicide: Regionality and Rurality

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

Regions

Child suicide rates (1999-2017) differ considerably by region: the Northeast has by far the lowest rate (11) while the South (15), the West (17), and the Midwest (18) have average rates (the US rate being 17 per million).

The Northeast rates remain considerably lower for teens and teen girls as well. 

Restricting rates to non-Hispanic White Teen Children leads to only slight changes: while the Northeast still has by far the lowest rate (42) and the South and the Midwest have average rates (62-63), the West has a slightly elevated rate (69).

We can therefore see that the low suicide rates in the Northeast are not due to demographics, at least not basic race/ethnicity/sex/age factors.

Rurality

The CDC WISQARS tool has a new classification "Metro Areas" that includes over 82% of the 1999-2017 child population; I refer to this section as 'rurality' in order to reflect the fact that the CDC non-Metropolitan areas seem to correspond to what the Census Bureau defines as rural areas.

Rural areas have over 50% higher child suicide rates compared to Metro areas (2.21 versus 1.43), an imbalance that increases to 63% for boys but decreases to 34% for girls.

When restricted to non-Hispanic White Teen Children, rural areas still have markedly elevated rates for boys (32%) but not for girls (4%).

Regions and Rurality

There are noticeable differences in the rural/metro ratio among the four regions:

     Metro Rural  Ratio Rural/Metro

NE   3.88  6.18   1.6

S    6.20  6.48   1.1

MW   5.91  7.08   1.2

W    6.44  9.89   1.5


Rates displayed only for non-Hispanic White Teen Children.

Therefore after we restrict our population to non-Hispanic White Teen Children, the elevated rural rates occur only in the Northeast and the West regions.

Northeast Redux

We therefore see that the Northeast exception is further nuanced since, modulo race and ethnicity, its rural rates are not much lower than those in the South or the Midwest. 

Notes:

Rates are over the cumulative 1999-2017 period, and so should be fairly robust for large subgroups of the child populations.