Explaining the Rise in Youth Suicide

Emile Durkheim's Suicide documented a monotonically increasing relation between age and suicide. Such a relation has been observed repeatedly since the beginning of the nineteenth century, making it one of the most robust facts about suicide. The differences in suicide rates by age are very large. In the United States in 1950, for example, suicide rates were four times higher for adults (ages twenty-five to sixty-four) than for youths (ages fifteen to twenty-four) and eight times higher for the elderly (sixty-five and older) than for youths. 1 Economic theory explained this relation naturally, with the young having the most life to lose and also having the least information about what their life will be like (Hamermesh and Soss 1974). In recent decades, however, the monotonic relation between age and suicide has disappeared. Figure 5.1 shows suicide rates by age in 1950 and 1990. Between 1950 and 1990, youth-suicide rates tripled (particularly among young men), while suicide rates for adults fell by 7 percent, and suicide rates for the elderly fell by 30 percent. In 1990, suicide rates for young adults (ages twenty to twenty-four) were equal to those for prime-age adults and were only 25 percent below suicide rates for the elderly. 1. Throughout the paper, we refer to the fifteen-to twenty-four-year-old age group as youths. We sometimes divide this into teens (ages fifteen to nineteen) and young adults (ages twenty to twenty-four). Suicide is now the second or third leading cause of death for youths in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and many countries of Western Europe. If youth suicide is an epidemic, attempted suicide is even more so. For every teen who commits suicide (0.01 percent each year), four hundred teens report attempting suicide (4 percent per year), one hundred report requiring medical attention for a suicide attempt (1 percent per year), and thirty are hospitalized for a suicide attempt (0.3 percent per year). Why have youth-suicide rates increased so much even as suicide among adults and the elderly has fallen? Why are there so many suicide attempts? It is easier to say what suicide is not than what it is. The U.S. rise in youth suicide has not been centered in America's troubled inner cities. The states with the largest increase in youth suicides between 1950 and 1990 are predominantly rural: Wyoming, South Dakota, Montana, New Mexico, and Idaho. The states with the most troubled …