High schooler Suicide Rate Spikes 56% in a Decade
A new reportTrusted Source from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows that the teen suicide rate in the United States has skyrocketed in recent years.
Suicide was recently ranked as the second-leading cause of death for people between the ages of 15 and 24 years old.
Each year, about 7 out of 100,000 young adults between the ages of 15 and 19 die by suicide each year — and that number only seems to be growing.
The suicide rate had been on a steady decline between 2000 and 2007. Then, things picked up, and from 2007 to 2017, teen suicides spiked by nearly 56 percent — the rate climbing from 6.8 deaths per 100,000 people to 10.6, according to the report, which the CDC published today.
Similarly, homicides — the third-leading cause of death among the age group — declined between 2007 and 2014, then increased by about 18 percent in 2017.
The new statistics are sobering, to say the least, but some health experts suspect the teen suicide rate is even higher than what’s been reported.
“Even though the study by the CDC demonstrates an increased rate of completed suicide in the adolescent, young adult age group, I still think we need to recognize that suicide may be underreported, and that accidents continue to be the leading cause of death and a significant number of those accidents may actually have been suicide,” Dr. Victor M. Fornari, the vice chair of child and adolescent psychiatry at Zucker Hillside Hospital in Glen Oaks, New York, told Healthline.