Suicide and the Pressure on Teenage Girls

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From the AP, this story about suicide among  girls:

The suicide rate among preteen and young teen girls spiked dramatically in a disturbing shift that federal health officials say they can’t fully explain.

For all young people between ages 10 to 24, the suicide rate rose 8 percent from 2003 to 2004 : the biggest single-year bump in 15 years : in what one official called “a dramatic and huge increase.”

The report, based on the latest numbers available, was released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and suggests a troubling reversal in recent trends. Suicide rates had fallen by 28.5 percent since 1990 among young people.

The biggest increase was in the suicide rate for 10- to 14-year-old girls. There were 94 suicides in that age group in 2004, compared to 56 in 2003, a 67 percent increase. The rate is still low : fewer than one per 100,000 population.

Suicide rates among older teen girls, those aged 15-19 shot up 32 percent; rates for males in that age group rose 9 percent.

“In surveillance speak, this is a dramatic and huge increase,” Dr. Ileana Arias said of the overall picture. She is director of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control.

More research is needed to determine whether this is a trend or just a blip, said one child psychiatrist, Dr. Thomas Cummins of Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago. “We all need to keep our eye on this over time to see if this is a continuing trend.”

Overall, there were 4,599 suicides among young people in 2004, making it the third-leading cause of death, surpassed only by car crashes and homicide, Arias said. Males committed suicide far more often than females, accounting for about three-quarters of suicides in this age group.

The study also documented a change in suicide method. In 1990, guns accounted for more than half of all suicides among young females. By 2004, though, death by hanging and suffocation became the most common suicide method. It accounted for about 71 percent of all suicides in girls aged 10-14; about half of those aged 15-19; and 34 percent between 20-24.

“While we can’t say (hanging) is a trend yet, we are confident that’s an unusually high number in 2004,” said Dr. Keri Lubell, a CDC behavioral scientist who was one of the study authors. * * *

The CDC is advising health officials to consider focusing suicide prevention programs on girls ages 10-19 and boys between 15-19 to reverse the trends. It also said the suicide methods suggest that prevention focused solely on restricting access to pills, weapons or other lethal means may be of limited success. * * *

“Suicide is a multidimensional and complex problem,” Arias said. “As much as we’d like to attribute suicide to a single source so we can fix it, unfortunately we can’t do that.”

This is a very disturbing report that, if accurate, highlights the continuing unequal pressure that teenage girls face as compared to males (whose suicide rate is troubling enough).   The full AP story is available here.   For information from the CDC on suicide, see here.

-Ralph Michael Stein

 

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0 Responses to Suicide and the Pressure on Teenage Girls

  1. Joseph Slater says:

    Without minimizing the pressures on teenage girls, the tragedy that is suicide, or the disturbing nature of the apparent rise in suicides in young girls, I’m not sure these figures really show “continuing unequal presure that teenage girls face as opposed to males.” If I read the article exerpts above correctly, for at least the year 2004, the rate female suicides increased dramatically. But still, the article says, male suicides were 3/4 of the total number of suicides in 2004.

    Of course that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be looking into why the rates of female suicide increased.