The steady increase in suicides between 1999 and 2018 led many to call this phenomenon a "silent epidemic." According to the National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH), the age-adjusted suicide rate in this country increased by 35.2% in 19 years, from 10.5 deaths per 100,000 in 1999 to 14.2 per 100,000 in 2018. The rate declined slightly in 2019 to 13.9 per 100,000, but it's too early to tell whether this is a true downward shift.
There were over 47,500 deaths by suicide in this country in 2019, making it the tenth leading cause of death in the United States and the second leading cause of death for individuals between the ages of 10 and 34. An even more disturbing figure is the number of suicide attempts.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), for every death by suicide in 2019 there were as many as 29 attempts, totaling about 1.4 million attempts in 2019 alone. This doesn't even take into account the millions of Americans who thought seriously of suicide or made a suicide plan without following through. These figures are especially troubling because one of the biggest risk factors for death by suicide is a previous suicide attempt.
Given these figures, I think it's clear that suicide is a problem in our society. What, you may ask, can I do about it? That will be the subject of my next few blogs.
Sources for this blog:
https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide
https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/facts/index.html
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