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Suicide rates among US youth at highest point since 2000: Study

Wednesday, 19 June 2019 12:25 AM [ Last Update: Wednesday, 19 June 2019 12:31 AM ]

Suicide rates among American youth have reached their highest point since 2000, a new research finds.

Suicide rates among young American people have continued to soar in recent years and climbed to their highest point since 2000, according to a new research study.

Researchers from Harvard Medical School revealed in a paper released on Tuesday that the suicide rate in people aged 15 to 19 increased from eight per 100,000 in 2000 to 11.8 per 100,000 in 2017.

The suicide rate among young adults aged 20 to 24 also spiked from 12.5 to 17 per 100,000 people.

Overall in 2017, there were 6,241 suicides among young people aged 15 to 24, of whom 5,016 were young men and 1,225 were young women, according to the researchers.

"Our new information shows that suicide [among] adolescents has reached its highest recorded level, and it shows that there's especially an increase in recent years in adolescent males," said Oren Miron, the paper's lead author who is a research associate at Harvard Medical School in Boston. "The data shows that it is a very real threat."

"It really is an unprecedented surge," Miron added. "You can go back decades and you won't find such a sharp increase. Parents and teachers need to be aware that the rates have reached their highest recorded level, and they need to be on the lookout for both boys and girls."

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Miron and his team stressed that their study had assumed the reliability of death certificates, which could be subject to error, and had not gone into what contributing factors may have caused the increase.

"Future studies should examine possible contributing factors and attempt to develop prevention measures by understanding the causes for the decrease in suicides found in the late 1990s," they wrote.

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The Harvard Medical School researcher, however, personally stated that the opioid epidemic might be fueling part of the rise in suicide rates and social media was another likely contributor.

"It's much easier to bully," Miron said. "The apps are getting smarter and smarter at providing anonymity and hiding activity from grown-ups."

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