The Rise: Sex and Age

The Rise: Sex and Age

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

Suicide Rates for Tween Girls Quadrupled

Let us look specifically at a 'tween' category (age 10-14):

We see that compared to 2007, age-adjusted suicide rates in 2018 have tripled for tween boys and quadrupled for tween girls. Although increases are smaller using longer periods, it is important to keep in mind that unless the rise reverses soon, even cumulative data over 3 and 5 years will show extreme increases.

Suicide by Sex and Age

To consider smaller age groups, we will look at suicide deaths over cumulative 5-year periods in order to decrease volatility:

When we looked at age increases, we saw that switching to 2000 instead of 2006 (as the 3-year period midpoint) evened out rise disparities between ages 12 to 15. Let us implement a similar switch (using 5-year periods) when examining sex and age:

We see that for 12 and 13 year old girls, the rise remains extremely high, both in absolute terms (tripled deaths) and in relative terms (compared to older girls, whose rates roughly doubled).

Notes:

We used death counts because demographic changes have been slow -- comparing rates would lead to similar results.  We first used age-adjusted rates for 'tween' kids to demonstrate these extreme rises are not due to demographic trends.

Compared to 2007, the rates for tween girls are 17% higher in 05-07 and 28% higher in 03-07 -- these differences are not so large as to prevent eventual quadrupling of tween rates even at 3 or 5 year intervals if the current trend continues.

We calculated rates for 3 and 5 year periods merely as the average of yearly rates -- this may differ slightly from the rate calculated directly from deaths and population over this period.