The Rise In Historical Context

The Rise In Historical Context

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

Let us now examine the recent rise in its historical context by looking at rates from the 1990s and 1980s.  

There are, however, two complications.

First, CDC data used ICD-9 Codes until 1998.  ICD stands for International Statistical Classification and the transition from ICD-9 to ICD-10 may affect counts due to coding artifacts. 

Fortunately a table of ICD–10 and ICD–9 comparability ratios provided by CDC indicates that the 'death by suicide' category was not affected (comparability ratio 1.0022).

A second complication is that the CDC tool does not allow Custom Age Selection on the ICD-9 data form, so we are stuck with Age Groups 10-14 and 15-19.

This is not a terrible drawback; we will just look at historical rates for 'teens' (15-19) and 'tweens' (10-14) separately:

As we can see, 'teen' rates only recently climbed to levels comparable to those in late 1980s to early 1990s; indeed the entire period 1985-1995 has rates as high or higher as we have had only since 2015.

For the 'tween' category, on the other hand, the rates are higher, since 2013, than at any time since 1981. 

Furthermore, if the current upward trend in teen suicide continues or even remains at the 2017 level, we may enter a period of time when teen suicide rates will be considerably higher than at least since 1981.

Notes: 

There are massive differences between teens in 1980s to 1990s and teens today in terms of risk behaviors related to violence and drug use; we will look at this issue later.

Increasing willingness to classify deaths of children as suicides may be affecting younger age groups the most; we will also look at this issue later.

A few methods of suicide do have comparability ratios significantly different from 1, e.g. Unspecified Mechanism (1.7) and Other specified Mechanism (1.2) and even Cut or Pierce (0.87).  All others are between 0.9 and 1.1 -- viz the CDC comparisons table.

The CDC ICD-9 data form goes back to 1981, thus this is our starting point.