It's unfathomable. Self-reported, but still.

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My son barely survived the last couple of school years, during which 9% of high schoolers surveyed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention attempted suicide.

The actual CDC report:

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during the 12 months before the survey, 44.2% experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, 19.9% had seriously considered attempting suicide, and 9.0% had attempted suicide.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volum...urce=cio&utm_term=19

It is mind-blowing indeed.

Need to take some time to read the CDC report to get all the details...

Looks bad … hoping to find historical, past-years comparisons but haven’t so far.

There were a few in the CDC report. 2019 is still pre-COVID, so things seemed to have been getting worse even before the pandemic hit.

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Emerging data suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic has negatively affected the mental health of many children and adolescents (1). Before the pandemic, youth mental health was already an important public health concern (2,3). For example, among high school students nationwide, significant increases occurred between 2009 and 2019 in having persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness (26.1% to 36.7%), having seriously considered attempting suicide (13.8% to 18.8%), and having attempted suicide (6.3% to 8.9%) (2)

Wow!

I suspect they are mistaking teen angst answers for serious conditions. Teens pretend at suicidal anguish a lot and they tend to overdramatize the depths of their woe. One I know says she attempted suicide when all she really did was stand in front of a mirror and try to choke herself with her hands.

This is not to minimize the problem or the real tragedies. I just don't think it's as wide and deep as those factoids would imply.

I can't really imagine depression and a drive to suicide NOT being on the rise in today's world. This is indeed a sad statistic, though, yes, it requires more context to understand how it was arrived at both in the present and the past. By which I mean, how the previous statistics were arrived at, since it's the comparison that makes the new figures so disturbing and shocking. (I wonder whether there's a connection between the surveys showing ever fewer believing in G-d and those considering suicide).

There are definitely a number of very serious developments (internationally) in the last decades which are deeply distressing to everyone - in some ways, especially to youth.

Thinking particularly, of the awareness of and effects of Climate Change and the Covid pandemic (which seems to be unstoppable and a harbinger of plagues to come).

Climate Change has led to catastrophic changes throughout the world - fierce, unmanageable wildfires, droughts and consequent famines, unimagined heat levels which especially attack the poorest populations both directly and through killing marine life which provided them food sources. Personally, I always thought of the Oceans as a reassuring natural force - something unchangeable and protective. Witnessing their being undermined is like seeing the world's very parents perishing.

Drastically worsened storm seasons throughout the year leave no area untouched, while rising sea levels submerge populated areas and destroy farmland through toxic salination.

The Covid pandemic has cancelled traditional passages of life/ceremonies for all ages, for youth - socially, educationally, and by creating uncertainty about every aspect of their futures.

New wars undermine their sense of security, physically and economically, at the same time that they can't count on families and former social cohesion to help them cope.

Forced isolation including from their own peers, stress world youth in an all new way - leaving them unable to look to a viable future, one providing them with even the basic assurance of a livable habitat. New illness leaves even many young with long-term disability. Insecurity in all ways, encourages them to find outlets in temporary relief through substance abuse (a rise even in smoking in the West), and violence. It's especially widespread where they have access to advanced weaponry, which also victimizes them.

It would be surprising if such shaking the roots of their formerly expectable lives, did not lead to despair, suicidal thoughts and acting out. Meanwhile, social media accessible to almost all, makes their awareness of all this bad news universal. There is a contagion of despair and actual suicidal acting out among their peers, even on an universal level.

Almost forgot this.

Ghouls like these don't help this epidemic much! I'm sure they're responsible for a spike in the teen suicide thing.

Such a horrible thing to do, what an inheritance they leave for their time on earth. I find myself continue to wonder about them, why they do it. Do they think they're doing a favor to the species, is it a power trip or what?

It's not just that they're providing practical how-to recipes, but the successful "influencers" site they've set up. The way the ones still on the edge, cheer on those who've managed to go over the edge as "heroes". Horribly effective Madison Avenue talents, selling suicide to the young. One of the most effective dissuasions have been sensitively produced films,
interviews with broken family memories discussing their pain, their self recrimination, their everlasting grief. (I heard one deeply depressed "would-have been" who spoke of how he successfully fought the drive, once he realized through such a film what he would be leaving his mother.)

Many heartbroken parents are working to identify them and get the site shut down. Somehow it keeps coming back - international too. Such a cruel "creation".

One of the worst aspects of it, is not just the concrete information they provide but the specific reassurance they provide those debating about a successful way out - one that doesn't pose a risk of leaving them damaged but still alive, failsafe but leaving them physically intact, and not mutilated. (If any of you have ever dealt with the grieving survivors of a gunshot suicide, or other such....It's so much more traumatic.)

What do you think is behind their "mission"?
And what about the NYTimes reporting on it in such informative detail? They've gotten a lot of flak.

Those who help the despairing find the door

*********************************************

(I had an uncle - the sweet, completely self-sacrificing father of an adored namesake son who hanged himself. After years of trying to save his sick son, his father ended up having to cut his body down from the tree where he finally found it. I don't think he ever slept through a night for all his remaining years. Not one of the three surviving siblings ever had a child. It was hard not to be angry at my cousin.)

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I can't really imagine depression and a drive to suicide NOT being on the rise in today's world.

I agree, and it's one of many reasons why I am so discouraged about the hard right tilt our country has been taking over the past decades. Just a few things that younger folks are dealing with:

1. Climate change
2. Inability to find affordable housing
3. Inability to find a real (affordable wage) job
4. General feeling of unease at school, theaters, concerts or other places where crowds gather, due to wackos with guns
5. Unaffordable or unattainable health care
6. Hyper capitalism, telling them that money is more important than them as individuals, or as a society
7. Inability to go to college, or if you do, you're saddled with massive student debt
8. For progressives (the majority of younger people in the USA, though certainly not all) the assault on their values (pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, pro-LGBTQ, pro-trans, etc.) makes them feel unwanted in their own country. This SCOTUS ain't helping.
9. Fear that they are inferior based on the ridiculous stuff that's being posted to social media--items which are at best highly curated and at worst, totally fake (thinking here of extremely photoshopped images showing people as taller, thinner and more beautiful than a normal humanoid will ever be)

All of these have increased, and may of them are interrelated. Let me just touch on two: jobs and college education. The (almost exclusively) GOP at the state level has cut state funding for universities at an unheard of pace, resulting in the need for states to increase tuition, making a college education either unaffordable or unaffordable without amassing debt. Also bear in mind that the vast majority of students attend college in their state's public university system. The # of students who complete a degree in 6 yrs or less is declining, as many have to leave school to get jobs, and can only hope to return. The jobs that they are qualified for (even if they had been in a "lucrative" major such as business, engineering, health care, etc.) require a college education, so they're now working at a Starbucks. Actually Starbucks would be a good job, as they receive health benefits. (Paging piano*dad, who can explain this far better than me.)

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Originally posted by Nina:

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I can't really imagine depression and a drive to suicide NOT being on the rise in today's world.

I agree, and it's one of many reasons why I am so discouraged about the hard right tilt our country has been taking over the past decades. Just a few things that younger folks are dealing with...

My list and Nina's list could certainly be expanded all too easily, but here's one other important reason for the rising suicide rate (thinking especially in the US, since it's the only country whose stats I really know).

That is, the very suicide rate itself which has such a terrible contagion. Microscopically, whenever there's a suicide in a particular school or township, the police force and mental health professionals go on alert to do what they can to decompress the feelings it arouses that can lead to copycat effects.

Macroscopically, when a high profile case is publicized in the news (including IMO when it's a combined with a murder), it has a much broader ripple effect.

Bullying and misuse of the power of the internet, expand these two forces all the more. I wonder about the standards news media ought to abide by in covering suicides - local and those of well-known youth. (Not even counting the aberration of that suicide "encouragement/how-to" site I wrote about earlier. Its influence.)

I also always wonder about suicide among the young, their fragility in exposure to suicide reporting. I think it's always been there perhaps because of their vulnerability to peer influence. Now, though, with the much wider dissemination of the news stories, one suicide has the potential to lead to far more of a domino effect.

(Not mentioned here yet, is what is perhaps the saddest permutation of this stat - suicide among elementary age children. I can scarcely even bring myself to think of it. IMO little children shouldn't even know about suicide, much less be familiar with modalities.)

Once more, my mind returns to its occasional obsession of DAMN THE INTERNET! Guess that Pandora's Box can never be closed.