The Rise: Teenage Cohorts

The Rise: Teenage Cohorts

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

The CDC data allows approximate tracking of age cohorts: a death of a 15-year-old boy in 2015 means he was born in 1999 or 2000. As we are interested in general patterns, we will ignore the ambiguity and presume such a child was born in 2000.

Doing so we can calculate Age Cohort suicide rates, and to further simplify we will only consider the teen years (age 13-17):

Here the label 04-08 means the kids in that cohort were 13 in 2004 and 17 in 2008 (and so born in 1991).

Thus the cohort who was 17 in 2018 ended up with an 83% higher teenage suicide rate than the cohort that was 17 in 2010.  Unless there are steep declines in 2019 and 2020, we can expect that current cohorts will have double the teenage suicide rates of the teens a decade before them.

Let us also look at girls separately:

There are no surprises here; the rise is similar but steeper: the latest cohort to reach adulthood experienced twice as many teenage suicides as most cohorts from the earlier part of the millennium.