The Rise: Excess Deaths by Child Age

The Rise: Excess Deaths by Child Age

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

We noted previously that there were over 5 thousand total 'excess' suicides among children between 2008 and 2018 compared to suicide in the year 2007.

Let us now look at the excess deaths by age:

We see that the total number of excess suicides at age 14 to 16 is similar in size and close to those at age 17, even though suicide rates of kids age 14 are still much lower than those age 16 or 17.  

The reason for this is that suicide of younger kids has been growing faster than suicide of older kids during The Rise (e.g. from 1.8 to 6.1 for 14-year-old kids versus from 5.9 to 11.0 for 17-year-old kids).

Note that total excess deaths for teenage children (age 13-17) alone is over 5 thousand.  For all children it is above 5-and-a-half thousand.

Technical Notes:

The counts are adjusted for yearly population size to ensure increasing or decreasing numbers of kids at a given age did not skew the results too much.

Since the base of comparison are age rates in a single year (2007), the results should not be interpreted too specifically.  We saw previously, however, that the 'younger suicide rose faster' rule remained true when we compared 3 or 5 year averages.