The Rise: Tween Suicide Trends

The Rise: Tween Suicide Trends

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

Let us now examine the 'tween' (age 10-14) share of youth (age 10-19) suicide to see if the faster rise of youth suicides was already a trend before The Rise.

We see that for tween boys the increases during The Rise were actually a reversal of the slight decline during the early millennium, with the smallest share occurring during the years 2006-2008.

Let us also look at the suicide rates trend of tween boys:

We see a sustained rise between 2007 and 2014, very similar to the rise in the proportion of youth suicides.  We also see that the large jump in 2017 did not produce a similar jump in the tween share of suicides -- this suggests that the factors behind male suicide increases may have shifted recently.

Let us now turn to girls:

For tween girls, there is no severe change until 2013, when there is a fairly stunning increase that has been largely sustained since.

To understand better what happened in 2013, let us look at tween girls suicide rates:

We see there is indeed a massive jump from 2012 to 2013. Moreover, the increase has been sustained in the following 5 years.  Indeed the divide between 2009-2012 and 2013-2017 is remarkable. 

Summary:  The tween share of youth suicides increased considerably during The Rise, especially for girls.  This was not a continuation of a previous trend for either boys or girls.  While the increase in tween boys share of youth suicide was the result of a slow but steady climb in tween boy suicide rates from 2007 to 2014, for girls this was the result mainly of a huge but sustained jump in 2013.

Notes:

I double-checked the CDC data to make sure there really is such a strong divide between 2012 and 2013 for tween girls:

2012 - 2013, United States
Suicide Injury Deaths and Rates per 100,000All Races, Females, Ages 10 to 14ICD-10 Codes: X60-X84, Y87.0,*U03

Year	Number of Deaths	Population***	Crude Rate
2012	85	10,109,728	0.84
2013	141	10,106,933	1.40

Although such counts may be subject to some random fluctuations, it is important to note there was nearly no volatility in the years before and after, as can be seen from the rates chart.

The fact that rates remained as high for 5 years after 2013 suggests this was neither an anomaly nor some kind of CDC data collection error.

As to explanations, I've seen no clear evidence that there was a huge jump between 2012 and 2013 in the use of social media or smart phones by tween girls -- if there is such evidence it would be worth investigating further.

As to news media suicide coverage, there was Amanda Todd (15) in October 2012, Hannah Smith (14) in August 2013, and Rebecca Sedwick (12) in September 2013 -- plus a number of other widely covered suicides of young girls supposedly linked to bullying on Ask.fm. Considerable work would be needed to estimate if there really was a huge increase of girl suicide news coverage between 2012 and 2013 -- and how it proliferated among tween girls.

Does anyone have any other ideas for the sudden change?