• Beauty & Fashion
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Health
  • Home & Garden
  • IT & Tech
  • Lifestyle
  • Money
  • Movies
    • Netflix vs. Hulu vs. Amazon Prime
    • SolarMovie Alternatives
    • 123Movies Alternatives
    • Sites Like FMovies
    • Putlocker Alternatives
  • Travel
  • Sports
  • Wheels

Latest Posts

View

Amazing Businesses You Can Run From Your Basement

July 29, 2022

View

Travel Tips for Dubai That You May Not Know

June 29, 2022

View

Baby Formula and Diaper Rash

April 5, 2022

Journal Enterprise

  • Beauty
  • Health
  • Home
  • Lifestyle
  • Technology
  • Travel
  • Beauty
  • Health
  • Home
  • Lifestyle
  • Technology
  • Travel

In News

Suicide Rates for US Teens and Young Adults are the Highest on Record

2.8K Views July 1, 2019

Suicide Rates for US Teens and Young Adults are the Highest on Record Pin It

A new study shows that suicide rates for teens and young adults are at their highest levels in two decades. The researchers sounded the alarm for 15-year-old to 19-year-old teens, who experienced an annual percentage change in suicide of 10 percent between 2014 and 2017.

Oren Miron, a researcher on mental health at Harvard Medical School and one of the researchers behind the troubling findings, call the surge in teen suicides “unprecedented” in the sense that combing through historical data won’t reveal a similar uptick in suicides among teens and young adults. These are truly record teen suicide rates.

Young Adults Also Impacted

Perhaps what’s most disquieting about these recent findings is that young adults are also being negatively impacted and experiencing markedly higher rates of suicide than previous generations. Young adults aged 20 through 24 are showing their highest rates of suicide since 2000, which was a particularly bad year for suicides among young adults. The rates of suicide for teens and young adults has increased for both males and females, but males seem to be more impacted by this disturbing trend.

Researchers have long noted that males are more likely to succeed at suicide, though females are more likely to attempt it. The reason probably resides in the fact that males choose more lethal means of suicide (e.g., gunshot) than women (e.g., pills). Recent research seems to partly support this finding by showing that suicides among adolescent males rose by 14 percent between 2015 and 2017 whereas suicide rates for adolescent females rose by only 8 percent between 2000 and 2017.

Social Media Could Be Partly Responsible

What’s causing these record teen suicide rates? The Harvard researchers who lead the study conjectured that social media could be behind the trend. Social media creates an easy means of comparing oneself against one’s peers.

What’s more, social media provides fertile ground for online bullying. The trouble with online bullying is that it can be faceless, which makes it potentially more vicious as teens feel they can hide behind a veil of anonymity. Teens may make disparaging comments to other teens that they wouldn’t dream about making in a face-to-face environment.

Two other factors make the social media hypothesis an attractive one – the uptick in suicide rates coincides with teens making heavier use of social media and, secondly, social media use has been connected to anxiety and depression.

Anxiety and depression are considered risk factors for each other such that experiencing anxiety may predispose teens towards depression. The fact that one mental health condition is associated with the other has been linked to the HPA axis by neuroscientists.

The HPA axis stands for hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, and psychologists and neuroscientists believe these areas are associated with anxiety and depression such that poorer function, which can be brought about by environmental factors like stress about fitting in at school, might predispose teens and young adults to depression.

The most fascinating link yet between social media use and depression is one that shows that social media use is linearly related to depression. The more social media use, in other words, the higher likelihood teens and young adults will be depressed. In turn, depression could lead to suicide ideation, which could lead to actually making the decision to end one’s own life.

Teens and young adults, in particular, who used social media websites like Instagram and Facebook have been shown to have substantially higher rates of reported depression. The studies vary in the actual percentage increase in reported depression, but they vary by percentage increases of between 15 percent and 65 percent.

Further Studies are Required

Though social media does explain quite a bit about the recent uptick in suicide rates among teens and young adults, researchers are eager to pursue other possible causes. The following have been forwarded by researchers as possibly also to blame:

  • Greater access to drugs, including alcohol
  • Family instability
  • Increased social pressure
  • Poorer detection of warning signs
  • Greater access to guns

So, what can be done while this research is being sorted out? Look for the warning signs of teen suicide: social withdrawal, talk about suicide, a sense of hopelessness, and a change in eating and/or sleeping patterns.

Share

You may also like

View Post

German Scammer Anna Sorokin Finessed Bank For $100K Personal Loan

Brodie Ryan Van Wagenen Citi

View Post

Brodie Ryan Van Wagenen is the Los Angeles man that Citi Field needs according to Ken Rosenthal

View Post

TJ Lang Retiring from NFL, Baller Worried By Neck Injury & Forward Head Posture

View Post

Biggest Prague Protest Since End of Communism For Czech’s Trump

View Post

Chase is Bringing Forced Arbitration Clauses Back to its Most Popular Credit Cards

View Post

Touring Czech Republic This Week, See Poo At Prague’s Zoo

Previous Post

Best Drone Cameras of…

In IT & Tech

Best Drone Cameras of 2019

View Post

Next Post

4 Bad Habits That You…

In Health

4 Bad Habits That You Need to Curtail During Sleep

View Post

Latest Posts

View

Amazing Businesses You Can Run From Your Basement

July 29, 2022

View

Travel Tips for Dubai That You May Not Know

June 29, 2022

View

Baby Formula and Diaper Rash

April 5, 2022

View

Changing modes of transportation over the decades

March 25, 2022

Featured Post

In Entrepreneurship

Amazing Businesses You Can Run From Your Basement

View Post

Lifestyle

View

Understanding The Materials Inside Your Vape

December 30, 2021

View

What’s In Your Formula Milk? Baby Formula Ingredients You Should Know

November 24, 2021

View

Who Needs a Medical Card?

November 22, 2021

View

Vape Liquid: Why You Should Use It?

April 16, 2021

View

Vape Shops – Online or Brick and Mortar?

November 3, 2020

View

3 Issues Kids Face Online and How to Protect Them

October 26, 2020

Movies

View

Trinity Seven Season 2

October 3, 2019

View

Blue Exorcist Season 3

October 2, 2019

View

Highschool DXD Season 5

October 1, 2019

View

Seraph of the End Season 3

September 30, 2019

View

Seven Deadly Sins Season 4

September 27, 2019

View

Sailor Moon Crystal Season 4

September 26, 2019

Home & Garden

View

5 Easy Air Conditioner Maintenance Tips

August 10, 2020

View

6 Must-Do Preparations for Selling Your Home

May 27, 2020

View

Home Surveillance Cameras: The Best Locations For Placement

May 4, 2020

View

Is Your House Full of Code Violations? What to Do about It

April 27, 2020

View

Best Places To Buy A House In North Carolina

April 13, 2020

View

6 Expert Locksmith Tips That Will Help Secure Your Home

April 6, 2020

Don’t Miss New Updates

  • Beauty
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Health
  • Home
  • Lifestyle
  • Money
  • Movies
  • Tech
  • Travel
  • Sports
  • Wheels

© 2022 Journal Enterprise - All Rights Reserved. Contact Us..