The Rise and Adult Suicide

The Rise and Adult Suicide

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

Child suicide has increased much faster (131%) than adult suicide (23%) between 2007 and 2018.

Let us now look at the increases by adult age groups:

Here the rise for age group  10-14 is so extreme that it does not fit the scale; child suicide rise (131%) is also far above any adult age group (45% for adult teens).

Excess Deaths

Child suicide increases are far larger than middle-age increases even in raw numbers:  in 2018 there were 12 'excess' suicides per million people aged 40-44 above 2007 rates versus 43 'excess' suicides per million teenage kids.

The difference in cumulative total of 'excess' deaths (2008-2018) is even more pronounced:  for every 40-something suicide above the count predicted by 2007 rates there were 5 teenage suicides above that base.

Contrast with Young Adult Patterns

In adults below 40, there is a fairly linear pattern correlating younger age with greater increases; the rise among children aged 15-17, however, is more than double the rise predicted by this linear pattern.

In other words, even kids close to adulthood are a special category when viewed in the context of young adult patterns during The Rise.

Is this divide clearly visible even in the transition from age 17 to 18?   

It is: suicide increased 86% for 17-year-old kids but only 43% for 18-year-old adults!

Notes:

• The transition from age 17 to 18 involves, besides legal adulthood, two major changes: the end of compulsory education and a massive decrease in time spent with parents. The question is: does either have anything to do with suicide rates rising much faster for kids?

• A bit of a mystery:  the increases in age groups 40-54 are far below those of groups both younger and older.  The contrast between age groups 35-39 and 40-44 is especially sharp.

• We have ignored the fact that adult rates have been increasing much longer than child rates -- we will take this into account in the next post.

Technical notes:

There were  were 889 excess suicides in age group 40-45 versus 5160 excess deaths in the teenage kids group (between 2008 and 2018 above 2007 rates adjusted for population size).  

There were actually fewer age 40-44 suicides in 2018 than there were in 2007 because the population size of this group declined by 10% while its suicide rate rose only by 7%.