How Does Age Affect Suicide Rates?
TRIGGER WARNING: this blog post contains information on gun deaths, specifically suicide.
Suicide is the tenth highest cause of death in the united states. There are approximately 135 people affected for every one suicide and around fifty thousand suicides in 2018 alone. It is obvious that suicide and depression are major problems in the US that have affected millions of people.
To explore this further I have taken a dataset from the CDC that documents gun deaths between 2012 and 2014. Nearly 65,000 of these gun deaths were suicides. I looked at numerous variables involving the suicides in this dataset. The most prevalent correlation was with age.
As you can see in our histogram there is a spike in suicides at around 22 years old. This is no surprise because according to the journal of Abnormal Psychology the age range with the highest reported rate of suicidal thoughts is between 16 and 25. Yet, the highest deaths due to suicides are among the 54-year-old age group.
Major Depressive disorder is the leading cause of disability for ages 15 to 45. Major Depressive disorder accounts for over fifty percent of suicides according to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. To show this I have used data from The National Survey on Drug Use and Health to make choropleth maps of the United States showing the average percentage of population per state of people between different age ranges that had a major depressive episode in 2013.
This data is very interesting because it indicates that the group of people that had the highest rate of suicidal thoughts is between 18 and 25. On average 7.46 percent of people between 18 and 25 had suicidal thoughts in 2013. In comparison, the age group of 26 and above had an average of 3.44 percent of people with suicidal thoughts in 2013.
This data indicates that suicidal thoughts or Major Depressive Episodes play a larger role in suicides of people between 18 and 25 than it does in people 26 and older. However, people that are 50 to 60 years old commit suicide at rates greater than people between the ages of 18 and 25. This begs the question: What is causing people between the ages of 50 and 60 to commit suicide at such high rates?
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1–800–273–8255
