Adolescent Suicides and Social Disparities

Introduction

Suicides among young people in the United States continue to be a serious problem. Suicides have been the second leading cause of death among children, adolescents, and young adults age 15-to-24-year-olds in the last decade. According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (2017), and its Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System, national suicide rate among teenage girls reached an all-time high in 2016, with 100.89% increase from 2000 to 2016; while national suicide rate increased 39.50% for teen boys within the same period (CDC 2017). These numbers strongly imply that suicide is a growing public health concern and teens are a particularly vulnerable group.

Many researchers found that adolescent people with mental health problems such as anxiety, depression or insomnia, are at higher risk for suicide (Kairi and Diego, 2016). Teens going through major life changes like parents' divorce, financial changes, a parent leaving home due to military service or parental separation, are at greater risk of suicidal thoughts (Beck-Little and Catton, 2011). It is especially noted that income inequality has increased consistently in the U.S. during the past decades, perhaps more than at any time in the history. The reports by the U.S. Census Bureau (2012) and the World Wealth Report (2010) stated that the assets of top 5% in the U.S. increase significantly even during period of recessions, while the high-salary and mid-class jobs have a trend to decrease especially after the financial crisis in 2008. The United States is concluded to be the most economically stratified society in the developed nations from World Bank (2010).

According to social strain theory (Sun and Zhang, 2016), when there’s a large gap between different income levels, those families at or near the bottom struggle to make their livings, making them susceptible to addiction, criminality and mental illness than those at the higher level. With the trend of the growing economic inequalities, when families have been losing jobs or had less financial supports because the social and economic welfares are taken away from them, some crisis may fall on these families. Especially the teenagers in these families are inevitably impacted by those negative changes.

Carter (2018) undertook an investigation and found that in the United States, the educational inequalities and a less progressive tax system have accounted for widening the gap between the top 1% income and the bottom 50%. In both global and national contexts, education is an especially important means of societal well-being through its role in improving social cohesion and reducing social inequalities and stratifications. Therefore it is worth also considering some education factors if available.

Effects of growing social and income inequalities on adolescent suicides in the United States during the last three decades are very new, confusing and even contradictive. More rigorous researches are needed to update what have been known about the present American context. In this paper, the socio-economic factors and the rigorous statistical models and methods will be applied to test effects of adolescent suicide risk of socio-economic inequalities. It is hypothesized that economic and social disparities in the United States play significant roles on adolescent suicides.

Literature Review

From 1990 to 2016, the mean value of American adolescent suicide rate is 6.5227 per 100,000, with the standard deviation 2.9397 per 100,000 (CDC WISQARS, 2019); the national female adolescent suicide rates in the United States increased 55.38% (CDC WISQARS, 2019); the national male adolescent suicide rates decreased from 1990 to 2000, then sharply increased about 39.32% to 10.56 per 100,000 in 2016 (CDC WISQARS, 2019). During this period, suicide became the second leading cause of death for American adolescent population (CDC, 2017).