The U.S. suicide rate rose in 2021 after two consecutive years of declines, federal data showed, underscoring concern about mental health in the shadow of the Covid-19 pandemic, writes Brianna Abbott of the Wall Street Journal.
The suicide rate last year increased 4% compared with the rate in 2020, provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed on Friday. The rise was driven largely by suicides among men. Males ages 15 to 24 experienced the sharpest increase at 8%, the report found.
“It’s disappointing to see that it went up at all,” said Jill Harkavy-Friedman, senior vice president of research at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. “We need to keep working to improve our tools for assessment and intervention.”
Mental-health conditions and suicide risks have been an area of greater focus for health officials, doctors and lawmakers recently, partly because of the strains of the pandemic. Officials in July opened an updated 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline to better help callers experiencing mental-health and substance-use crises.
Counselors answered some 318,000 calls, texts, and chats to the network in August, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
The suicide rate in the U.S. rose some 35% from 2000 to a peak in 2018. From 2018 to 2020, the rate declined some 5% overall. Suicide rates kept rising through 2020 among some groups including teenage girls and Black and Hispanic males, according to data.
Researchers at the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics found in the report released Friday that the overall, age-adjusted U.S. suicide rate rose to about 14 deaths per 100,000 people in 2021, just slightly below the 2018 peak.
“The declines have almost been totally wiped out by this increase,” said Sally Curtin, a health statistician at the National Center for Health Statistics and lead author on the report. The report didn’t analyse the data based on race, ethnicity, or geography.
Drawing conclusions from a single year of data is difficult, suicide researchers said, and the reasons behind the longer-term trends are hard to explain. Suspected suicides often require an investigation to determine a cause of death and can be misclassified as accidents or drug overdoses, making it difficult to ascribe meaning to smaller changes in the numbers, said Mark Olfson, a psychiatrist and epidemiologist at Columbia University Irving Medical Center.
“If you take a step back for a minute, we’re, I think, still in a period of gradually increasing risk,” Dr. Olfson said.
The risk of suicide tends to be higher in groups including veterans, Native Americans, people who are lesbian, gay or bisexual, middle-age adults, and people in rural areas, according to the CDC. Suicide was the second-leading cause of death among people between 10 and 14 as well as people 25 to 34 years old as of 2020.
A 2011 study found that economic cycles affect suicide rates. Some other evidence suggests that suicide rates might remain stable or decline during war or a disaster such as Covid-19, but rebound afterward, particularly among the hardest-hit populations.
“It’s that shared connectedness that we know is important for vulnerable people that increases in a time of crisis,” said Rheeda Walker, a clinical psychologist, suicide researcher and professor at the University of Houston. “In the aftermath, there isn’t as much attention and focus.”
Some 47,600 people in the U.S. died by suicide in 2021, making it the nation’s 11th-highest cause of death, according to provisional CDC estimates. The number is approaching an all-time high of 48,300 suicide deaths in 2018. The highest recorded suicide rate in the U.S. was some 22 deaths per 100,000 people in 1932, during the Great Depression.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-suicide-rates-rose-in-2021-after-two-years-of-decline-11664504876
