The suicide rate of middle school students among U.S. doubled from 2007 to 2014, exceeding for the first time the incidence of children with ages from 10 to 14 who died in car crashes, said from a report released on Thursday.
The steady seven-year rise, from 2007 to 2014, in middle school suicides, from an annual rate of 0.9 to 2.1 per 100,000, came as traffic deaths among the same group with the same age declined to 1.9 per 100,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or CDC is the leading national public health institute of the United States. It is a federal agency under the Department of Health and Human Services and is headquartered in unincorporated DeKalb County, Georgia, a few miles northeast of the Atlanta city limits.
"Any rise (in middle ages suicide rates) should be of concern, there's no doubt," Mark Kaplan, a professor of social welfare at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in a phone interview, commenting on the findings. "In time we might uncover some reasons, but a cautionary note [is] not to rush to any conclusions from this," Kaplan added.
According to Reuters, the motor vehicle mortality rate reported for 2014, the latest year for which such data was available, marked a 60 percent decline from 1999 when the government began tracking such figures. In aggregate numbers, 425 young people 10 to 14 years of age took their own lives in 2014, compared with 384 who perished in automobile accidents that year, according to the CDC.
Those figures contrasted sharply with figures from 1999, when the rate of middle school students killed in car crashes, was four times higher than the rate among those who died from suicide that year. The underlying problems of suicide are highly complex, making it difficult to explain and interpret the trends documented by the CDC.
The mortality rates from car crashes among all age groups have decreased over several decades in the United States. Since middle school students are more prone to traffic accidents, let us hope that the government, with the help od CDC, will do something about it.
