Millennial Changes in Child and Adult Suicide

Millennial Changes in Child and Adult Suicide 

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

Let us look at 'millennial' changes in suicide (from 2000 to 2018):

When viewed from the millennial perspective, child increases do not seem so extreme.

It is crucial to note, however, that child suicide increases are still far above young adult increases.

It is interesting that the young adults pattern here is the opposite of young adult patterns in The Rise: since 2000 young adult suicide rose more with increasing age, while since 2007 it rose less with increasing age.

In teenage children this reversal does not occur -- in other words, even in the longer-term 'millennial' rise there is something very different about children.

It is furthermore important to keep in mind that child rates actually decreased substantially from 1.5 in 2000 to 1.1 in 2007. 

The Rise is therefore all the more remarkable as a sharp reversal of previous trend.

To better see trend reversals, we can divide the last two decades into two periods:

Note that here the changes are averaged over the number of years in each period (7 and 11) so that the values now show average change per year.

The massive trend reversal is specific to children while middle-age adult rises are fairly slow and steady.  

Why is it that child suicide trends are so different from general adults trends?

We will soon see that there may be a simple answer once we examine the correlation of youth suicide with cumulative suicide rates -- an indicator of childhood exposure to suicide.