Deaths Due to Suicide, Homicide on the Rise Among U.S. Youth

*The following is excerpted from an online article posted on HealthDay.

More teens and young adults are coming to a violent end in recent years, either at their own hand or another’s, new federal data show.

Both suicide and homicide death rates are rising among 10- to 24-year-olds, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS).

“Recently, in the last few years, they’re both trending upward. Suicide began to turn upward earlier, in 2007, and now in 2014, homicide turned around as well,” said Sally Curtin, an NCHS statistician. “These are leading causes of death, and they both are increasing now.”

The suicide rate for young people aged 10 to 24 rose 56% between 2007 and 2017, with the pace increasing of late, the researchers said.

Suicide deaths increased 7% annually from 2013 to 2017, compared with 3% annually between 2007 and 2013, the investigators found.

Meanwhile, homicide deaths among 10- to 24-year-olds rose 18% between 2014 and 2017, after nearly a decade in decline, the researchers said.

Accidental deaths — car crashes, drug overdoses, and drownings — remain the leading cause of death in this age group, Curtin said. But deaths due to suicide and homicide are right behind and rising.

It’s impossible to nail down any single cause for this increase in violent deaths among the young, said Dr. Alex Crosby, chief medical officer for the division of injury prevention at the CDC.

Homicide and suicide rates differed slightly between specific age groups of young people, the researchers reported.

For example, the suicide rate for 10- to 14-year-olds nearly tripled between 2007 and 2017, while their homicide rate declined 18% during the period between 2000 and 2017.

But people in the 15 to 19 and 20 to 24 age ranges have experienced increases in both suicide and homicide rates.

The report was published in the October issue of the CDC’s NCHS Data Brief.

Source: HealthDay
https://consumer.healthday.com/general-health-information-16/suicide-health-news-646/deaths-due-to-suicide-homicide-on-the-rise-among-u-s-youth-751349.html