Sharing – Suicide rate keeps rising among young Americans
The increase is startling.
“In actual numbers, the suicide rate among 10- to 24-year-olds jumped from about 7 per 100,000 in 2007 to nearly 11 per 100,000 in 2018, according to the National Vital Statistics Report published Sept. 11.”
Note that this is all pre-2020, so we can’t blame this on pandemic, or anything else that’s been going on since 2018. We know that there’s been an increase of suicidal thought during all of this, but as the article below points out, that doesn’t always correlate to more deaths. We will have to wait and see what those numbers look like.
Right now, we do know the rates have been increasing for young people sharply, and there is no one reason that would explain that. It’s lot of little, yet complicated, reasons. So there’s no one thing that we can do to turn it around. There are lots of little, hard, things that we need to do.
Things like, as the article says, looking out for each other, and our kids. We will also need to be raising awareness, finding ways to make more resources available, fixing a system where too many crisis situations end up with a call to 911 and a response by untrained law enforcement officers instead of those with mental health and crisis intervention training, and simply being better people all across society.
Until we are ready to take those things on, this will continue to be one tragedy after another.
