The Rise: Age Trends

The Rise: Age Trends

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

Child suicide rates have climbed steadily between 2007 and 2017 across the age spectrum:

Accumulating data over 3-year periods removes all volatility:

Since we stretched the timeline back to 2000 (midpoint of 1999-2001), we can see that recent rates significantly surpassed rates at the start of the millennium by year 2012 for ages 12-15 but not until year 2014 for those aged 16 and 17.

Younger Rates Increased Faster

Comparing 2006-2008 with 2015-2017 shows that suicide among younger teens grew faster than among older teens:

Rates for age 12-14 more than doubled, while those for 15-17 less than doubled.

Is it possible that these differences are due to larger decreases among younger kids in early millennium years?  Let us compare current rates with 2000 as midpoint:

We see that switching to 2000 as the base midpoint evens out the rise in ages 12 to 15, but the rates for these younger kids have still increased substantially more than for nearly adult teens.

Excess Deaths Largest for the 16-year-old Age Group

The total numbers of 'excess' suicides are still higher among older teens, as can be seen if we count 'extra' deaths per 4.2 million (close to the average size of age cohorts) in 2015-2017:

The numbers represent the amount of 'extra' deaths in 2015-2017 if suicide rates could have remained the same as in 2006-2008 and age cohorts were uniformly 4.2 million in size.  With preteens included (about 70 'extra' deaths) the overall number of excess suicides in 2015-2017 amounts to well over 2000 deaths.

The chart also reveals that the 'younger rates rise faster' phenomenon is so strong that 'excess' deaths are the largest for 16-year-old instead of 17-year-old children.

Notes:

The average size of an age 12 to age 17 cohorts in 2017 was about 4.2 million (4,209,527).

Is it possible that child suicide rates increased in part because teens have become -- be it due to rapidly changing birth rates or due to immigration trends -- a larger part of the child population?

The answer is no: the teenage portion of child population actually declined between 2007 and 2017 (from 29.5% to 28.4%).