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Response 09 Apr 1998
Doc. No. 266
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On March 20, 1998 newspaper readers in the United States were told of an alarming rise in the suicide rate among black youth. Under the headline "Suicide Rate of Young Blacks Up Dramatically", the Associated Press reported that "The suicide rate among black children and teen-agers in the United States more than doubled between 1980 and 1995, and one reason might be the stress of achieving middle-class success, the government said yesterday." The "government" in this case was the Epidemiology Program Office of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, a unit of the Department of Health and Human Services. That office publishes Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, a journal of interest to medical researchers and epidemiologists, as part of its Scientific Communications efforts. MMWR, as it is called, is an unlikely place to encounter political spin control. Or so you'd think. The press reports were based on an article in the March 20, 1998 issue of MMWR entitled Suicide Among Black Youths -- United States, 1980-1995. The article states that: "This report summarizes trends in suicide among blacks aged 10-19 years in the United States during 1980-1995 and indicates that suicidal behavior among all youths has increased; however, rates for black youths have increased more, and the gap between rates for black and white youths has narrowed." However, in seeking to explain this phenomenon which affects boys but not girls, whether black or white, the MMWR takes the unlikely tack of going into elaborate explanations focusing on race: "One possible factor may be the growth of the black middle class (6). Black youths in upwardly mobile families may experience stress associated with their new social environments. Alternatively, these youths may adopt the coping behaviors of the larger society in which suicide is more commonly used in response to depression and hopelessness (7). Another factor may be differential recording of suicide as a cause of death on death certificates. Suicide as a cause of death may be entered less readily for black youths than for white youths (8).
Here is a graph of suicide rates among youths 15-19, exactly as it appeared in the MMWR:
Here is the same graph, but broken out by sex as well as race:
Here are comparable graphs for youths aged 10-14:
To make things as clear as possible, here is a graph of the trend lines, as computed by the least-squares regression method:
All data for these graphs is taken from the National Center for Health Statistics publication DEATH RATES FOR 72 SELECTED CAUSES, BY 5-YEAR AGE GROUPS, RACE, AND SEX: UNITED STATES, 1979-95 -- (RATES PER 100,000 POPULATION) which is available on line at: It is hard to look at these graphs and imagine that race is the determining factor in the rise of suicide among "youth". Quite clearly, regardless of race, suicide is increasing dramatically among boys... but not girls. A reasonable way of summarizing this data is as follows: "This report summarizes trends in suicide among youths aged 10-19 years in the United States during 1980-1995 and indicates that suicidal behavior among boys has increased dramatically, especially among blacks, and the gap between rates for black and white boys has narrowed; however, rates for girls are much lower and have decreased or remained the same over the period." In remarks on May 1, 1997 in Los Angeles, before a group called Girls in the Media, Secretary Shalala had said: "While growing up these days is tough for everyone, the research tells us that girls experience adolescence differently than boys. While boys often become more aggressive, girls often turn inward and self-destruct. While boys often smoke to be rebellious, girls often do it to stay thin. Young girls become less likely to engage in physical activity. More likely to be depressed. More likely to attempt suicide."
"Research shows that early adolescence is a critical transition time from childhood to adolescence. It is a time of experimentation, risk taking, and growing independence. However, girls and boys experience some aspects of early adolescence in different ways, because they encounter different social, cultural, physiological and psychological challenges. For example, research shows that among girls, puberty tends to bring a higher incidence of depression, while among boys, puberty tends to increase the occurrence of aggressive behavior. According to HHS' 1995 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, ninth-grade girls are nearly twice as likely as ninth-grade boys to have thought seriously about attempting suicide in the past year (34.4 percent versus 18.2 percent) and more than twice as likely to attempt suicide at least once in the past year (14.9 percent versus 6.8 percent)." Can we. In the hopes that we were being unfair to the Secretary's office, we ran a search on the Department's web site: This is the search report for the search you ran on Mar 24 15:51:43 1998.
"Health of Young Girls and "Girl Power!"
According to the article in the MMWR, "Firearm-related suicides accounted for 96% of the increase in the suicide rate for blacks aged 10-19 years." And as we have shown here, "Suicides among boys accounted for 100% of the increase in the suicide rate for blacks aged 10-19 years." It should be obvious now that if any attention is paid to the fact that suicide among boys is six times higher than among girls, and is rising much faster, that might threaten the funding for the Secretary's Girl Power! self-esteem campaign.
And we can't have that, even if children are blowing their heads off
with guns.
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