Falling Without a Net
Recent data from the Center for Disease Control show an alarming spike in suicides across the United States. We can’t prevent every suicide by rebuilding our social safety net. But the uptick is a collective failure — one that requires political solutions.
Emile Pissarro, L’Île Lacroix, Rouen (The Effect of Fog), 1888.Wikimedia
Yesterday the New York Times published an op-ed about suicide among young people in the United States. As the author writes, citing Center for Disease Control (CDC) data, “After declining for nearly two decades, the suicide rate among Americans aged 10 to 24 jumped 56 percent between 2007 and 2017.” He notes that while suicide remains more common among men, the rate has been increasing quickest among young women, rising 12.7 percent each year as compared with 7.1 percent for young men.
A further look at the CDC data underlines the trend. As Sally C. Curtin and Melonie Heron note in a National Center for Health Statistics brief for the CDC, not only did the suicide rate go from remaining stable among ten- to twenty-four-year-olds between 2000 and 2007 to jumping 56 percent over the following decade, “the pace of increase for suicide was greater from 2013 to 2017 (7 percent annually, on average) than from 2007 to 2013 (3 percent annually).”
In other words, the suicide rate is accelerating — it may well have been even higher in 2018 and 2019.
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