
A major finding about suicide indicates a worrying trend among young people, and particularly among young girls, that are difficult to explain.
A new report released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicates that something is happening with regards to suicide in the last few years, although it’s not clear exactly what that is. For some reason, the rate of suicide for teen girls has reached a 40-year high based on 2015 statistics, and has skyrocketed in just the last eight years.
Things are pretty bad for teenage boys and young men too, as they saw their suicide rates increase by 30 percent between 2007 and 2015, but it was nowhere near as bad as it is for teen girls 15-19, who saw the rate double over that time period.
The suicide rate has fluctuated significantly in the last few decades, but this has been the biggest jump ever in such a short period of time. Back in 1975, the suicide rate for girls 15 to 19 was 2.9 per 100,000, which moved to 3.7 in 1990, dropped to 2.4 in 2007, and is now 5.1 as of 2015. Those numbers went from 18.1 in 1990 to 10.8 in 2007, and is now back up to 14.2 out of 100,000.
“These data show that between 2007 and 2015, there’s substantial increases in suicide rates for both young males and young females,” said Tom Simon, an author of the report and associate director for science in the division of violence protection at the CDC, according to a CNN report. “For young males, there was a 31% increase in suicide rates, and for young females, the suicide rate doubled.”
CDC statistics indicate that there were 1,289 suicides among young males in 1975 in the United States. For girls 15 to 19 that year, there were 305 suicides, and in 2015, that figure is 1,537 for males and 524 for females between 15-19.
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