Why no charts showing the differences between teen boys and teen girls suicides? Your article admits that it is basically an emergency to focus help on boys and men since they are by far the most likely to suicide but instead the article focuses on the increase in girls suicide. This is an important increase but let's focus on those who are most likely to commit suicide. Why no help there?
Why no articles there? Well, because gynocentrism. A woman's pain is a call to action and a man's pain is taboo. Until people realize their own bias men and boys will continue to be ignored.
This trend requires more nuance. Here are the first and second leading age groups by suicide rate over the last six years:
2018: 55-59, 50-54
2019: 55-59, 45-49
2020: 30-34, 25-29
2021: 25-29, 20-24
2022: 50-54, 30-34*
2023: 55-59, 35-39*
*Suicide totals for 2022 are preliminary and appear 99%+ complete; totals for 2023 are preliminary and appear 98%+ complete. They may change, but probably not radically. (Source: CDC)
Unless some radical anomaly occurs in finalizing 2023-24 numbers, suicide rates appear to be returning to middle-aged high risk. However, age 30-39, older Millennials born 1980-1993 may be becoming a second node, for reasons unknown. For now, it appears that COVID may well have brought a spike in 20-29 suicides, not a long-term mental health trend.
Suicide is the main officially-determined form of self-destructive death, but there is another, larger one that also is self-inflicted and involves self-destructive behavior: overdose of non-prescribed drugs and of alcohol. Here is the same trend for the two leading age groups for overdose death rates:
2018: 35-39, 30-34
2019: 35-39, 30-34
2020: 35-39, 30-34
2021: 35-39, 40-44
2022: 35-39, 40-44
2023: 40-44, 35-39
Again, provisional 2022-23 figures will change when finalized, though probably not much. The above immediate overdose deaths exclude use of legally prescribed drugs, drug suicides, and deaths from long-term drug/alcohol abuse.
There are some good indications that both the suicide and overdose rates declined among the teenage and 20-age populations but rose substantially for the 30-age, 40-age, and 50-age groups after 2021. So, we might want to hold off declaring that young ages are taking over the self-destructive categories until we have better, longer-term data.
I look at what’s happening at elite universities and have a hard time believing the problems with young people are caused by smart phones. Smart phones are just equipment. This has always been about the content the smart phones deliver.
Very valuable work. One point I might add to illuminate this. Intervention in the UK with young women and girls focuses on managing self harmers on the basis this is somewhat predictive of suicide. The interventions (eg CBT) are calibrated based on success in managing the progression from self harm to suicide. What this completely ignores is boys and young men who do not typically show this progression as they are less likely to self harm in ways that are recognised as self harm. This places them totally outside the dataset. (An unusual case of standardised health responses being ineffective for males, when usually it's the other way round.) I would expect this intervention model and its statistical basis (approved by the UK's NICE) is used or referenced widely outside of the UK.
Hate to say this but the religion of Capitalism has finally got to our youth. Its creed of profits over people has been eating away at our social fabric for decades.
Doesn’t this counter the social media argument though, as from what I’ve seen you and Jon have been saying social media is primarily hurting young girls. If young boys have a higher spike in suicides, could it be a different issue causing this that is also causing the spike in girls, and it’s not social media which effects girls more but something that effects boys more?
you attribute the decrease in 40-49 and 50-59 suicides to covid, but it looks like it starts before covid. in like ~2018. it looks like it starts to decrease at about the same time 30-39 and 20-29 starts to increase.
if the general consensus is the increase in suicides is content/media/app content consumed + the phone as a delivery device, is there anything that currently exists that tracks the types of media/app/content that is being consumed on phones by the different age groups over the years?
or is your thought that is only relevant to younger girls?
Thank you Jean, for this and all your other work..
And it’s great to see the recognition that men and boys account for the vast majority of suicides. This is barely ever mentioned in the media. And this massive rise in the rates for younger men is truly shocking – but sadly not surprising. It shows the impact of societal attitudes towards men, which these young men have been ingesting in school and in the media their entire lives.
What is the message that has been pounded into them? That they, especially white cis men, are the cause of all the evil and oppression that exists in the world. So who would want to become one of those evil perpetrators?
What makes things worse, is that despite the fact that the vast majority of, not only suicide, but also incarceration, addiction and homelessness are borne by men, those men and their issues continue to be ignored by the political elite of the country and the political system as a whole.
When was the last time we had a discussion of a political issue that was specific to men the way reproductive rights, sexual abuse and assault, and pay equity, are specific to women – or affirmative action to women, people of color and the LGBT+ community.
Our identity politics centers around everyone EXCEPT men, especially white working-class men. And that is why Trump is likely to win another election.
It isn’t as though Trump is going to actually do anything for them. But there is one thing they can count on from him. And it’s one of the few rational aspects of Trump’s appeal to working-class men – he does not demonize them by calling them the root of all evil and oppression in the world. Plus he tends to bash those groups and individuals who do demonize them, like academia, the media and the Hollywood elite.
So maybe if the Democrats spent a little time trying to reach those men, they might be able to defeat Donald Trump – and save a few precious young lives in the process.
I'm curious about why the two older decade cohorts - for both sexes and for men - decisively drop after 2019 in contrast to the other cohorts. Why? Seems counter-intuitive.
On the male-female suicide question: Yes, male suicides have always been significantly higher, in every age group. However, female suicide *attempts* have traditionally been higher than for males.
Men and boys are far more likely to use lethal means (guns especially). There could be more than one reason for this: first, males have much more ready access to guns. And there's a behavioral difference (caused in part by testosterone?) that we call "decisive" when we approve of it, and "impulsive" when we don't. The above is definitely true for teens and young adults -- I think it also goes for older age groups although I am not sure.
So it's not necessarily true that society values women more, or cares more about their pain, while regarding men as disposable. I mean, given all the preferences shown to males throughout history, how could that make sense? I do think that men and boys are trained not to admit weakness or call for help -- the stigma against that could be a real factor.
Suicide has now returned to being a middle-aged crisis. The newest CDC figures show claims that young people are now the primary suicide problem due to long-term mental health troubles appear baseless.
Suicide rates in 2022 and 2023 for ages 50-59 are 10% higher, and total self-inflicted suicide and overdose death rates 57% higher, than for age 20-29, the CDC now reports.
The CDC lists no more deaths in 2022 (out of 3,275,928 tabulated and reported) and only 53,117 deaths (less than 2% out of 3,088,494 reported) in 2023 remaining to be added. Totals will change slightly as a few more deaths from slow-reporting jurisdictions are added and provisional counts become final counts, but not nearly enough to shift the order of entire age groups.
The temporary 2020-21 spike in age 20-29 suicides coinciding with the COVID pandemic abated in 2022 as middle-aged suicides rose and appears to have continued to fall in 2023. That doesn’t mean these sub-trends should be ignored. Scientists should examine how pandemic stresses boosted young-age suicidality and post-pandemic factors increased middle-aged suicide.
Overall, as Gen Z grew up from 2000 through 2022, self-inflicted suicide/overdose deaths rose 68% faster among ages 50-59 (up 54.0 annual deaths per 100,000 population) than ages 20-29 (32.1). Among both age groups, self-inflicted death rates have risen faster to higher levels among low-education and conservative-state populations. Fixation only on social media and young people is obscuring these far larger trends.
I'm reminded of Malcolm Gladwell's speech at Penn about suicide due to CTE among college students. He lamented the tendency for both individuals and institutions to continue to refuse to even consider change under the perpetual demand for "more evidence". However no one can say what threshold of proof needs to be met to even talk about what change is necessary. It is necessary to start pushing back on leaders and lawmakers to define what that threshold is to initiate action. Need more proof? What is the maximum suicide rate we will tolerate? How many young lives are expendable and what happens when we reach n+1?
1) As I understood it, adolescent girls are more likely to attempt suicide than boys are, but because boys tend to employ irreversible mean more often (e.g., guns rather than pills), boys are more likely to actually die from suicide.
2) Major social shifts often occur in response to economic shifts. A lecture I attended long ago by eminent social historian Peter Stearns noted that there were many indicators of a major shift in how old age was viewed as a function of the industrial revolution. When vast segments of the populace began to work in factories, and their wealth came from employment earnings, rather than the family farm, one didn't need to venerate one's parents, in order to inherit the family farm. One saw many indices of "respect for the elderly" begin to decline.
In North America, and many parts of the industrial world, the late 1970s brought the growth of the fast food industry and a major increment to the disposable income of adolescents and young adults employed in McJobs. That increase in disposable income for those cohorts brought increased commercial attention. Yes, there were teen magazines, teen fashions, teen-oriented TV shows, and such prior to then, but there were no teen-focused 24hr radio or television broadcasts and newsstands became more focused on the adolescent market. Twenty years earlier, Ricky Nelson had tried to dress liike his father Ozzie, but now parents began to try and dress, look, and even talk like their adolescent children. How many people in their 40s and 50s do you know who say "Am I'm, like,..." or other adolescent speech mannerisms? The incursion of adolescent speech into the adult mainstream is rather surprising.
Anthropologist Margaret Mead had proposed many years earlier that the generation one turns to for critical information varies with the rate of cultural change. In highly stable "traditional" cultures one turns to those with the longest experience within the culture for critical information - the elderly. As rate of cultural change speeds up, attention turns to one's adult peers, and finally to those with the most recent experience within the culture - the young. So, between the leap in economic clout that adolescents acquired in the late '70s and early '80s, and the manner in which rapid technological change sped up cultural change, we seemed to have entered the era of an "adolocentric society" in which the priorities of adolescents and young adults are to be valued and turned to for benchmarks. Patience used to be considered a virtue, but now impatience is prioritized and valued.
When we look at adolescent psychological development, there seem to be three major hurdles to clear. One is forging a sense of self. A second is becoming capable of emotional intimacy with one's peer group. But a third is learning how to manage affect and separate it from cognition and reasoning. Indeed, we perceive adolescents who are able to set aside their emotions and anticipated affect from their reasoning, as "mature for their age". It is the tendency for teens to conflate how something makes them feel with its legitimacy or reasonableness that results in them being paradoxically MORE likely to take risks as well as being more risk averse. This conflation of reason and emotion is why the same teen who might be deathly afraid of giving an oral presentation in class would also be willing to ingest a hallucinogen or liquor at a party. It is also why one might be able to talk a 40 year-old down from a ledge, but an 18 year-old is absolutely convinced, by their emotions, that there is no hope, no salvation, no possible reconciliation, and no one could possible understand. The emotion-based aversion of risk (e.g., the fear of confiding some unpleasant truth to a parent or other) with the emotion-based tendency to treat impulsive acts as legitimate and somehow properly reasoned/decided is what results in the higher suicide rate among adolescents. They are victims of their own generational prominence within society.
At the societal level, let us remember that there have now been several generations who have grown up within the context of a youthful-is-better milieu. Many of us do mature, thank goodness, but a great many seem to have been persuaded that "going with their gut" (i.e., treating affect as equivalent to "evidence" in their decision-making) is the right thing to do, well into their 30s, 40s and beyond (anyone who was 18 in 1980 is 62 now). One has to wonder if the sustained tendency to think like an adolescent, and believe that such an approach to reasoning is desirable and laudable, accounts for the support of a certain presidential candidate, and the ease with which so many seem to conflate surface likeability with competence.
It seems most suicide prevention should be focused on rebuilding the building blocks - families, communities, and culture. Family and religion are huge buffers to suicide. In our current culture it's just so easy to see and realize that most people don't matter - you matter to God and your family, foremost, everyone and everything else there's lots of caveats and conditions that are ever changing. RIP to those that died way too soon.
Why no charts showing the differences between teen boys and teen girls suicides? Your article admits that it is basically an emergency to focus help on boys and men since they are by far the most likely to suicide but instead the article focuses on the increase in girls suicide. This is an important increase but let's focus on those who are most likely to commit suicide. Why no help there?
Why no articles there? Well, because gynocentrism. A woman's pain is a call to action and a man's pain is taboo. Until people realize their own bias men and boys will continue to be ignored.
They look at the world we're in and find it difficult to find things to live for.
My daughter doesn't even want to have a child.
This trend requires more nuance. Here are the first and second leading age groups by suicide rate over the last six years:
2018: 55-59, 50-54
2019: 55-59, 45-49
2020: 30-34, 25-29
2021: 25-29, 20-24
2022: 50-54, 30-34*
2023: 55-59, 35-39*
*Suicide totals for 2022 are preliminary and appear 99%+ complete; totals for 2023 are preliminary and appear 98%+ complete. They may change, but probably not radically. (Source: CDC)
Unless some radical anomaly occurs in finalizing 2023-24 numbers, suicide rates appear to be returning to middle-aged high risk. However, age 30-39, older Millennials born 1980-1993 may be becoming a second node, for reasons unknown. For now, it appears that COVID may well have brought a spike in 20-29 suicides, not a long-term mental health trend.
Suicide is the main officially-determined form of self-destructive death, but there is another, larger one that also is self-inflicted and involves self-destructive behavior: overdose of non-prescribed drugs and of alcohol. Here is the same trend for the two leading age groups for overdose death rates:
2018: 35-39, 30-34
2019: 35-39, 30-34
2020: 35-39, 30-34
2021: 35-39, 40-44
2022: 35-39, 40-44
2023: 40-44, 35-39
Again, provisional 2022-23 figures will change when finalized, though probably not much. The above immediate overdose deaths exclude use of legally prescribed drugs, drug suicides, and deaths from long-term drug/alcohol abuse.
There are some good indications that both the suicide and overdose rates declined among the teenage and 20-age populations but rose substantially for the 30-age, 40-age, and 50-age groups after 2021. So, we might want to hold off declaring that young ages are taking over the self-destructive categories until we have better, longer-term data.
I look at what’s happening at elite universities and have a hard time believing the problems with young people are caused by smart phones. Smart phones are just equipment. This has always been about the content the smart phones deliver.
Very valuable work. One point I might add to illuminate this. Intervention in the UK with young women and girls focuses on managing self harmers on the basis this is somewhat predictive of suicide. The interventions (eg CBT) are calibrated based on success in managing the progression from self harm to suicide. What this completely ignores is boys and young men who do not typically show this progression as they are less likely to self harm in ways that are recognised as self harm. This places them totally outside the dataset. (An unusual case of standardised health responses being ineffective for males, when usually it's the other way round.) I would expect this intervention model and its statistical basis (approved by the UK's NICE) is used or referenced widely outside of the UK.
Hate to say this but the religion of Capitalism has finally got to our youth. Its creed of profits over people has been eating away at our social fabric for decades.
Is anyone also considering the primary harm caused by wireless radiation?
https://romanshapoval.substack.com/p/techmyth
Thank you Jean for all the work you do.
Doesn’t this counter the social media argument though, as from what I’ve seen you and Jon have been saying social media is primarily hurting young girls. If young boys have a higher spike in suicides, could it be a different issue causing this that is also causing the spike in girls, and it’s not social media which effects girls more but something that effects boys more?
you attribute the decrease in 40-49 and 50-59 suicides to covid, but it looks like it starts before covid. in like ~2018. it looks like it starts to decrease at about the same time 30-39 and 20-29 starts to increase.
if the general consensus is the increase in suicides is content/media/app content consumed + the phone as a delivery device, is there anything that currently exists that tracks the types of media/app/content that is being consumed on phones by the different age groups over the years?
or is your thought that is only relevant to younger girls?
Thank you Jean, for this and all your other work..
And it’s great to see the recognition that men and boys account for the vast majority of suicides. This is barely ever mentioned in the media. And this massive rise in the rates for younger men is truly shocking – but sadly not surprising. It shows the impact of societal attitudes towards men, which these young men have been ingesting in school and in the media their entire lives.
What is the message that has been pounded into them? That they, especially white cis men, are the cause of all the evil and oppression that exists in the world. So who would want to become one of those evil perpetrators?
What makes things worse, is that despite the fact that the vast majority of, not only suicide, but also incarceration, addiction and homelessness are borne by men, those men and their issues continue to be ignored by the political elite of the country and the political system as a whole.
When was the last time we had a discussion of a political issue that was specific to men the way reproductive rights, sexual abuse and assault, and pay equity, are specific to women – or affirmative action to women, people of color and the LGBT+ community.
Our identity politics centers around everyone EXCEPT men, especially white working-class men. And that is why Trump is likely to win another election.
It isn’t as though Trump is going to actually do anything for them. But there is one thing they can count on from him. And it’s one of the few rational aspects of Trump’s appeal to working-class men – he does not demonize them by calling them the root of all evil and oppression in the world. Plus he tends to bash those groups and individuals who do demonize them, like academia, the media and the Hollywood elite.
So maybe if the Democrats spent a little time trying to reach those men, they might be able to defeat Donald Trump – and save a few precious young lives in the process.
I'm curious about why the two older decade cohorts - for both sexes and for men - decisively drop after 2019 in contrast to the other cohorts. Why? Seems counter-intuitive.
On the male-female suicide question: Yes, male suicides have always been significantly higher, in every age group. However, female suicide *attempts* have traditionally been higher than for males.
Men and boys are far more likely to use lethal means (guns especially). There could be more than one reason for this: first, males have much more ready access to guns. And there's a behavioral difference (caused in part by testosterone?) that we call "decisive" when we approve of it, and "impulsive" when we don't. The above is definitely true for teens and young adults -- I think it also goes for older age groups although I am not sure.
So it's not necessarily true that society values women more, or cares more about their pain, while regarding men as disposable. I mean, given all the preferences shown to males throughout history, how could that make sense? I do think that men and boys are trained not to admit weakness or call for help -- the stigma against that could be a real factor.
Suicide has now returned to being a middle-aged crisis. The newest CDC figures show claims that young people are now the primary suicide problem due to long-term mental health troubles appear baseless.
Suicide rates in 2022 and 2023 for ages 50-59 are 10% higher, and total self-inflicted suicide and overdose death rates 57% higher, than for age 20-29, the CDC now reports.
The CDC lists no more deaths in 2022 (out of 3,275,928 tabulated and reported) and only 53,117 deaths (less than 2% out of 3,088,494 reported) in 2023 remaining to be added. Totals will change slightly as a few more deaths from slow-reporting jurisdictions are added and provisional counts become final counts, but not nearly enough to shift the order of entire age groups.
The temporary 2020-21 spike in age 20-29 suicides coinciding with the COVID pandemic abated in 2022 as middle-aged suicides rose and appears to have continued to fall in 2023. That doesn’t mean these sub-trends should be ignored. Scientists should examine how pandemic stresses boosted young-age suicidality and post-pandemic factors increased middle-aged suicide.
Overall, as Gen Z grew up from 2000 through 2022, self-inflicted suicide/overdose deaths rose 68% faster among ages 50-59 (up 54.0 annual deaths per 100,000 population) than ages 20-29 (32.1). Among both age groups, self-inflicted death rates have risen faster to higher levels among low-education and conservative-state populations. Fixation only on social media and young people is obscuring these far larger trends.
I'm reminded of Malcolm Gladwell's speech at Penn about suicide due to CTE among college students. He lamented the tendency for both individuals and institutions to continue to refuse to even consider change under the perpetual demand for "more evidence". However no one can say what threshold of proof needs to be met to even talk about what change is necessary. It is necessary to start pushing back on leaders and lawmakers to define what that threshold is to initiate action. Need more proof? What is the maximum suicide rate we will tolerate? How many young lives are expendable and what happens when we reach n+1?
1) As I understood it, adolescent girls are more likely to attempt suicide than boys are, but because boys tend to employ irreversible mean more often (e.g., guns rather than pills), boys are more likely to actually die from suicide.
2) Major social shifts often occur in response to economic shifts. A lecture I attended long ago by eminent social historian Peter Stearns noted that there were many indicators of a major shift in how old age was viewed as a function of the industrial revolution. When vast segments of the populace began to work in factories, and their wealth came from employment earnings, rather than the family farm, one didn't need to venerate one's parents, in order to inherit the family farm. One saw many indices of "respect for the elderly" begin to decline.
In North America, and many parts of the industrial world, the late 1970s brought the growth of the fast food industry and a major increment to the disposable income of adolescents and young adults employed in McJobs. That increase in disposable income for those cohorts brought increased commercial attention. Yes, there were teen magazines, teen fashions, teen-oriented TV shows, and such prior to then, but there were no teen-focused 24hr radio or television broadcasts and newsstands became more focused on the adolescent market. Twenty years earlier, Ricky Nelson had tried to dress liike his father Ozzie, but now parents began to try and dress, look, and even talk like their adolescent children. How many people in their 40s and 50s do you know who say "Am I'm, like,..." or other adolescent speech mannerisms? The incursion of adolescent speech into the adult mainstream is rather surprising.
Anthropologist Margaret Mead had proposed many years earlier that the generation one turns to for critical information varies with the rate of cultural change. In highly stable "traditional" cultures one turns to those with the longest experience within the culture for critical information - the elderly. As rate of cultural change speeds up, attention turns to one's adult peers, and finally to those with the most recent experience within the culture - the young. So, between the leap in economic clout that adolescents acquired in the late '70s and early '80s, and the manner in which rapid technological change sped up cultural change, we seemed to have entered the era of an "adolocentric society" in which the priorities of adolescents and young adults are to be valued and turned to for benchmarks. Patience used to be considered a virtue, but now impatience is prioritized and valued.
When we look at adolescent psychological development, there seem to be three major hurdles to clear. One is forging a sense of self. A second is becoming capable of emotional intimacy with one's peer group. But a third is learning how to manage affect and separate it from cognition and reasoning. Indeed, we perceive adolescents who are able to set aside their emotions and anticipated affect from their reasoning, as "mature for their age". It is the tendency for teens to conflate how something makes them feel with its legitimacy or reasonableness that results in them being paradoxically MORE likely to take risks as well as being more risk averse. This conflation of reason and emotion is why the same teen who might be deathly afraid of giving an oral presentation in class would also be willing to ingest a hallucinogen or liquor at a party. It is also why one might be able to talk a 40 year-old down from a ledge, but an 18 year-old is absolutely convinced, by their emotions, that there is no hope, no salvation, no possible reconciliation, and no one could possible understand. The emotion-based aversion of risk (e.g., the fear of confiding some unpleasant truth to a parent or other) with the emotion-based tendency to treat impulsive acts as legitimate and somehow properly reasoned/decided is what results in the higher suicide rate among adolescents. They are victims of their own generational prominence within society.
At the societal level, let us remember that there have now been several generations who have grown up within the context of a youthful-is-better milieu. Many of us do mature, thank goodness, but a great many seem to have been persuaded that "going with their gut" (i.e., treating affect as equivalent to "evidence" in their decision-making) is the right thing to do, well into their 30s, 40s and beyond (anyone who was 18 in 1980 is 62 now). One has to wonder if the sustained tendency to think like an adolescent, and believe that such an approach to reasoning is desirable and laudable, accounts for the support of a certain presidential candidate, and the ease with which so many seem to conflate surface likeability with competence.
It seems most suicide prevention should be focused on rebuilding the building blocks - families, communities, and culture. Family and religion are huge buffers to suicide. In our current culture it's just so easy to see and realize that most people don't matter - you matter to God and your family, foremost, everyone and everything else there's lots of caveats and conditions that are ever changing. RIP to those that died way too soon.