The Rise: Suicide Methods (Boys)

The Rise: Suicide Methods (Boys)

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

Summary:  There have been no major shifts in suicide methods among boys during The Rise.   The theory of increasing access to guns is not supported by data as an explanation of The Rise.

A chart of suicide methods does not indicate any major shift since 2007:

We see that while the start of the millennium saw a considerable decrease -- both absolute and proportional -- in firearm deaths, there has been only a minor sustained shift toward increased firearms share of suicide methods, and only starting in 2013.

As to poisoning suicides, there is no indication of any increase after 2007.

As more than 9 out of 10 suicides among boys are due to either firearms or suffocation, let us look at these two methods as shares of all male child suicide methods since 2007:

The proportional changes are too small to explain The Rise in terms of an increasing access to firearms, since one would expect far larger proportion of excess suicides to be firearm deaths.

Notes:

There is a difference between a theory being unsupported by data and contradicted by data.

The above data does not exclude the possibility of up to half the excess deaths during The Rise being due to increased access to firearms, but it does make it less likely because there would also have to be an independent factor driving up suffocation deaths that coincided with the access to firearms factor in both timing and intensity.  To complicate matters, the factor behind increased suffocation would have to have much smaller effect on firearm deaths. Due to these reasons it seems unlikely that increasing access to firearms is a major force behind The Rise.  (Formalizing such probabilistic reasoning is not trivial but it is sound -- see Bayesian inference and Occam's razor.)