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Suicide rates on the rise: state trends and variation in suicide deaths from 2000 to 2018
Suicide rates on the rise: state trends and variation in suicide deaths from 2000 to 2018
- Collection:
- Health Policy and Services Research
- Author(s):
- Planalp, Colin, author
Hest, Robert, author
Au-Yeung, Carrie, author - Contributor(s):
- State Health Access Data Assistance Center, University of Minnesota, issuing body.
- Publication:
- [Minneapolis, Minnesota] : State Health Access Data Assistance Center, June 2020
- Language(s):
- English
- Format:
- Text
- Subject(s):
- Suicide -- statistics & numerical data
Suicide -- trends
State Government
United States - Genre(s):
- Technical Report
- Abstract:
- When the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced in 2016 that life expectancy in the United States had dropped, the finding made national headlines. Prior to that, U.S. life expectancy hadn't dropped in decades--not since 1993. Similar findings of further declines in life expectancy announced in 2017 and 2018 showed this decline wasn't a fluke, as data continued to reveal that Americans were leading increasingly shorter lives. Although death records show there are multiple causes of death contributing to decreased life expectancy (e.g., increased death rates from lung and Alzheimer's disease), two factors have consistently played a role in the trend: suicide and unintentional injuries, including accidental drug overdoses. Around the same time the CDC was documenting declines in U.S. life expectancy, researchers from Princeton University began to study death rates and found that the U.S. was unique among industrialized countries. While death rates were declining in other wealthy nations--such as Canada, Japan, and Germany--death rates have been increasing among certain American populations, particularly non-Hispanic whites with lower incomes and lower levels of education. Those same researchers found three main causes of death that accounted for the increased death rates--suicide, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related liver disease--which they called "deaths of despair." They and other researchers have posited that increased deaths of despair may be a response to decades of economic and social changes, leaving many Americans feeling their life situations have not met their expectations and without strong social institutions to help them navigate through the turbulence. While recent increases in deaths from drug overdoses, especially opioids, have received substantial attention, the toll of other deaths of despair is less widely known. This issue brief examines state-level data on suicide death rates from 2000 to 2018. Using vital statistics data, it examines how state suicide rates vary and how their trends compare to the U.S. trend of increasing suicide rates, as well as differences across the states in rates of suicide by firearm and non-firearm methods.
- Copyright:
- Reproduced with permission of the copyright holder. Further use of the material is subject to CC BY-NC-ND license. (More information)
- Extent:
- 1 online resource (1 PDF file (8 pages))
- Illustrations:
- Illustrations
- NLM Unique ID:
- 101772156 (See catalog record)
- Permanent Link:
- http://resource.nlm.nih.gov/101772156