The doubling of adolescent suicide 2007-17 will be the primary subject of my new Substack series in which I will update my original series from 2019 with new data and a wider scope of inquiry.
My apologies if my clumsy wording implied I don't respect your work. When commenting, I focus on areas of difference, but this isn't meant to insinuate that all other views are therefore valueless. I appreciate your adding the Abandonment Deaths graph, which is a compelling trend other researchers need to take seriously to move past the current mass insistence that parents' and adults' trends have nothing to do with teen depression and suicide. I will say again what I've said before: I'm looking forward to your conclusions.
Thanks for sharing this important work. It dovetails sadly with analyses also outside the current mainstream about how destigmatization of substance abuse does not, in fact, reduce harm. The circles of harm are getting ever wider and more heartbreaking.
I subscribed to this substack because I appreciated Dr. Stein’s critique of Dr. Twenge’s, Dr. Haidt’s, and others’ increasingly untenable position that social media is a significant driver of poor teenage mental health – one that has now retreated into “(tiny)-correlation-must-equal-(mass)-causation” logic. I also appreciate his attention to “international suicide trends” and “child maltreatment.” I made two suggestions I did not think would provoke annoyance. One is that the teen suicide increase in the 2007-2018 period is better analyzed in the larger 2000s context of Gen Z being raised, and that parents’ and adults’ drug/alcohol abuse be included – especially the eruption in overdose deaths among US ages 30-59 from 13,650 (2000) to 47,900 (2018) and 76,500 (2022). The research Dr. Stein did “long ago” might or might not remain relevant to his current analysis of youth suicide, because today’s teens are being raised by a parent generation manifesting the worst drug/alcohol abuse ever documented. A mountain of research associates parents’ addictions with profound harm to children’s and teens’ mental health, yet American researchers have near-unanimously ignored that issue. Example: Dr. Stein cites Dr. Haidt’s report of increased girls’ suicide across the Anglophone world; unfortunately, Dr. Haidt fails to mention that parent-age drug/alcohol abuse also skyrocketed in other Anglo countries (i.e., among England/Wales’ 30-69-year-olds: 557 deaths (1995), 998 (2000), 2,637 (2022)): https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/datasets/deathsrelatedtodrugpoisoningenglandandwalesreferencetable ;
Unfortunately, the CDC 2021 ABES, while the most comprehensive, fails to survey teens on parents’ and household adults’ drug/alcohol abuse, though it does report high rates of adult violent and emotional abuse toward teens under somewhat different criteria than past surveys. We simply do not know what 30-50% of teens mean by frequently feeling in poor mental health or sad, let alone what other factors might account for the two-thirds of teens’ depression that multivariate analysis fails to associate with the ABES’s factors. I look forward to what Dr. Stein’s findings reveal. I am only suggesting that parental and adult behaviors appear both the most promising and unstudied.
It is a mystery to me how anyone could read my short Intro post and conclude that I am ignoring "parental and adult behaviors" -- the very essence of the theory I proposed and the 'Deaths of Abandonment' term I coined and mention in the Intro.
When you start with "Here's a much more informative chart" you imply my article is of little if any value. When then your chart turns out to be an almost exact replica of my own graph related to the Abandonment Deaths mentioned in the Intro, it is a bit bizarre.
If you were an ordinary reader, I'd merely point out that I've addressed this topic in the past and will do so again soon in the revised series.
The truth is I am aware that back in the 1990s you were one of the lone voices trying to counter the widespread vilification of teens by the media and politicians. I admire that.
I've been one of the lone voices, over the past 5 years, to repeatedly point to "parental and adult behaviors" as a crucial yet overlooked potential explanation of the adolescent declines in mental health. I've also repeatedly lamented the lack of scholarly attention as well as data collection.
I hoped you'd give at least a cursory glance to my work before you essentially dismiss it as useless while proclaiming 'new' ideas that are almost verbatim repetitions of what I've been stating for years. Of course my expectations is a problem of my own making, so in the future I'll treat your comments with the same patience as those of ordinary readers.
I've updated my Intro article with the Abandonment Deaths graph so as to make sure there can really be no misunderstanding by anyone that the focus indeed has been on parental and adult conduct affecting kids.
Here's a much more informative chart showing all suicide, overdose, and suspected suicides and rates for teens age 12-17, young adults ages 18-24, and parent-age adults ages 30-64, for the entire period Gen Z was growing up. Note that parent-aged death rates rose 3 times faster than teen rates to a level 9 times higher than for teens and twice as high as for young adults (source: CDC WONDER). Do you think trends like these, esp given estimates that one-fourth of teens live with drug/alcohol abusing parents and grownups, and 18% of teens report violent abuses and 65% report emotional abuses by household adults (source: CDC), could possibly have anything to do with teens' depression?
Thus a teen in 2019 had nearly double the likelihood of having previously experienced a childhood trauma due to an 'abandonment' death of a parent or a similarly close adult.
---
In fact that is the reason I coined the term Deaths of Abandonment -- to underscore the psychological difference between losing a dad to suicide or overdose versus to homicide or accident.
As to child maltreatment, it's been on my list of topics from the start in 2019:
The trouble here is a criminal lack of reliable trend data on child maltreatment, especially emotional neglect (rather than physical abuse) -- however see my article International Declines in Parental Support of Students (https://theshoresofacademia.blogspot.com/2021/09/international-declines-in-parental.html), which counters the notion of parents increasing coddling their kids.
If you bother to read my series started in 2019, you'll realize that much of what you have written lately simply echoes my own work from years ago. It would also help if you read my critiques of Twenge and Haidt and others over the years, including passages like this:
---
The current state of adolescent mental health may seem unprecedented if one follows news media coverage and yet indicators ranging from happiness to suicide show that the current situation is comparable to the mental health state of teens in the early 1990s -- and that it is much better if we consider aggression and drug abuse as part of overall mental health.
Could it be that child depression and suicide has been increasing partly in proportion with the increasing share of parenting done by the very generation whose own adolescence was marked by extremely poor mental health? I have yet to see any psychologists explore this possibility in depth, perhaps because they have developed a blind spot due to the frequent portrayals of our youth as far more mentally troubled than any previous generations -- including those of the very academicians now offering various explanations as to why kids nowadays are supposedly so fragile.
---
I do all the work on adolescent suicide in my spare time and it has nothing to do with furthering my career, which is in math education. I would greatly appreciate if you'd at least read what I've written on the subject in the past (see https://theshoresofacademia.blogspot.com/) so I do not have to spend time -- which for me is very limited -- having to respond by repeating what I've already stated long ago.
I hope you will consider diving into the suicide clusters at schools (and other places kids congregate). I’d be interested to see if you found any relationship between size of the student body and competitiveness of the environment. I know both The Palo Alto High School and NYU had some of the higher profile clusters in the past decade or so.
Unfortunately I do not know of public data that would allow such an analysis, if you come across please let me know. There are of course some case studies of suicide teen contagion, but I've seen no general study linking the size of high schools etc. with suicide, at least in the U.S.
David, this is a great post. I hadn't realized that young teen girls have quadrupled. Thank you.
My apologies if my clumsy wording implied I don't respect your work. When commenting, I focus on areas of difference, but this isn't meant to insinuate that all other views are therefore valueless. I appreciate your adding the Abandonment Deaths graph, which is a compelling trend other researchers need to take seriously to move past the current mass insistence that parents' and adults' trends have nothing to do with teen depression and suicide. I will say again what I've said before: I'm looking forward to your conclusions.
Thanks for sharing this important work. It dovetails sadly with analyses also outside the current mainstream about how destigmatization of substance abuse does not, in fact, reduce harm. The circles of harm are getting ever wider and more heartbreaking.
I subscribed to this substack because I appreciated Dr. Stein’s critique of Dr. Twenge’s, Dr. Haidt’s, and others’ increasingly untenable position that social media is a significant driver of poor teenage mental health – one that has now retreated into “(tiny)-correlation-must-equal-(mass)-causation” logic. I also appreciate his attention to “international suicide trends” and “child maltreatment.” I made two suggestions I did not think would provoke annoyance. One is that the teen suicide increase in the 2007-2018 period is better analyzed in the larger 2000s context of Gen Z being raised, and that parents’ and adults’ drug/alcohol abuse be included – especially the eruption in overdose deaths among US ages 30-59 from 13,650 (2000) to 47,900 (2018) and 76,500 (2022). The research Dr. Stein did “long ago” might or might not remain relevant to his current analysis of youth suicide, because today’s teens are being raised by a parent generation manifesting the worst drug/alcohol abuse ever documented. A mountain of research associates parents’ addictions with profound harm to children’s and teens’ mental health, yet American researchers have near-unanimously ignored that issue. Example: Dr. Stein cites Dr. Haidt’s report of increased girls’ suicide across the Anglophone world; unfortunately, Dr. Haidt fails to mention that parent-age drug/alcohol abuse also skyrocketed in other Anglo countries (i.e., among England/Wales’ 30-69-year-olds: 557 deaths (1995), 998 (2000), 2,637 (2022)): https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/datasets/deathsrelatedtodrugpoisoningenglandandwalesreferencetable ;
https://www.statista.com/statistics/812284/deaths-from-opioid-overdose-canada-age-share/
https://ndarc.med.unsw.edu.au/resource-analytics/trends-drug-induced-deaths-australia-1997-2019
Unfortunately, the CDC 2021 ABES, while the most comprehensive, fails to survey teens on parents’ and household adults’ drug/alcohol abuse, though it does report high rates of adult violent and emotional abuse toward teens under somewhat different criteria than past surveys. We simply do not know what 30-50% of teens mean by frequently feeling in poor mental health or sad, let alone what other factors might account for the two-thirds of teens’ depression that multivariate analysis fails to associate with the ABES’s factors. I look forward to what Dr. Stein’s findings reveal. I am only suggesting that parental and adult behaviors appear both the most promising and unstudied.
It is a mystery to me how anyone could read my short Intro post and conclude that I am ignoring "parental and adult behaviors" -- the very essence of the theory I proposed and the 'Deaths of Abandonment' term I coined and mention in the Intro.
When you start with "Here's a much more informative chart" you imply my article is of little if any value. When then your chart turns out to be an almost exact replica of my own graph related to the Abandonment Deaths mentioned in the Intro, it is a bit bizarre.
If you were an ordinary reader, I'd merely point out that I've addressed this topic in the past and will do so again soon in the revised series.
The truth is I am aware that back in the 1990s you were one of the lone voices trying to counter the widespread vilification of teens by the media and politicians. I admire that.
I've been one of the lone voices, over the past 5 years, to repeatedly point to "parental and adult behaviors" as a crucial yet overlooked potential explanation of the adolescent declines in mental health. I've also repeatedly lamented the lack of scholarly attention as well as data collection.
I hoped you'd give at least a cursory glance to my work before you essentially dismiss it as useless while proclaiming 'new' ideas that are almost verbatim repetitions of what I've been stating for years. Of course my expectations is a problem of my own making, so in the future I'll treat your comments with the same patience as those of ordinary readers.
I've updated my Intro article with the Abandonment Deaths graph so as to make sure there can really be no misunderstanding by anyone that the focus indeed has been on parental and adult conduct affecting kids.
Thank you for your comments.
Here's a much more informative chart showing all suicide, overdose, and suspected suicides and rates for teens age 12-17, young adults ages 18-24, and parent-age adults ages 30-64, for the entire period Gen Z was growing up. Note that parent-aged death rates rose 3 times faster than teen rates to a level 9 times higher than for teens and twice as high as for young adults (source: CDC WONDER). Do you think trends like these, esp given estimates that one-fourth of teens live with drug/alcohol abusing parents and grownups, and 18% of teens report violent abuses and 65% report emotional abuses by household adults (source: CDC), could possibly have anything to do with teens' depression?
Year Age 12-17 Rate Age 18-24 Rate Age 30-64 Rate
2000 1,220 5.0 4,513 16.6 29,505 23.1
2001 1,194 4.9 4,716 16.8 31,952 24.5
2002 1,164 4.6 5,187 18.2 35,957 27.2
2003 1,135 4.5 5,589 19.3 37,864 28.4
2004 1,294 5.0 5,999 20.5 39,211 29.1
2005 1,275 4.9 6,088 20.7 41,128 30.2
2006 1,250 4.8 6,622 22.4 44,784 32.5
2007 1,183 4.6 6,808 22.8 47,898 34.5
2008 1,293 5.0 6,826 22.6 49,469 35.3
2009 1,327 5.2 6,706 22.0 50,628 35.8
2010 1,281 5.1 7,142 23.3 52,220 36.6
2011 1,381 5.5 7,526 24.2 55,081 38.3
2012 1,363 5.4 7,362 23.5 55,916 38.8
2013 1,434 5.7 7,427 23.6 57,712 39.9
2014 1,495 6.0 7,783 24.7 60,913 41.8
2015 1,567 6.3 8,591 27.5 65,571 44.8
2016 1,740 7.0 9,805 31.8 73,683 50.3
2017 1,945 7.8 10,250 33.5 79,849 54.2
2018 1,996 8.0 9,386 30.8 78,856 53.5
2019 1,836 7.3 9,349 30.9 81,272 55.1
2020 2,106 8.4 11,577 38.6 95,989 65.0
2021 2,315 8.9 12,181 40.5 109,345 72.9
2022 2,226 8.5 10,951 36.4 112,317 74.9
Change +70% +119% +224%
I've explored overdose data four years ago in the article Childhood Trauma: Adult Fatal Injuries (https://theshoresofacademia.blogspot.com/2020/03/childhood-trauma-adult-fatal-injuries.html), particularly in the graph Abandonment Deaths Exposure -- Adult (30-59) Suicides plus Overdoses (which is essentially a visual form of your own chart above).
I concluded back then (in 2020):
---
Thus a teen in 2019 had nearly double the likelihood of having previously experienced a childhood trauma due to an 'abandonment' death of a parent or a similarly close adult.
---
In fact that is the reason I coined the term Deaths of Abandonment -- to underscore the psychological difference between losing a dad to suicide or overdose versus to homicide or accident.
As to child maltreatment, it's been on my list of topics from the start in 2019:
Child Maltreatment and The Opium Epidemic: The Neglected Hypothesis (see https://theshoresofacademia.blogspot.com/2019/11/youth-suicide-rise-articles-index.html)
The trouble here is a criminal lack of reliable trend data on child maltreatment, especially emotional neglect (rather than physical abuse) -- however see my article International Declines in Parental Support of Students (https://theshoresofacademia.blogspot.com/2021/09/international-declines-in-parental.html), which counters the notion of parents increasing coddling their kids.
If you bother to read my series started in 2019, you'll realize that much of what you have written lately simply echoes my own work from years ago. It would also help if you read my critiques of Twenge and Haidt and others over the years, including passages like this:
---
The current state of adolescent mental health may seem unprecedented if one follows news media coverage and yet indicators ranging from happiness to suicide show that the current situation is comparable to the mental health state of teens in the early 1990s -- and that it is much better if we consider aggression and drug abuse as part of overall mental health.
Could it be that child depression and suicide has been increasing partly in proportion with the increasing share of parenting done by the very generation whose own adolescence was marked by extremely poor mental health? I have yet to see any psychologists explore this possibility in depth, perhaps because they have developed a blind spot due to the frequent portrayals of our youth as far more mentally troubled than any previous generations -- including those of the very academicians now offering various explanations as to why kids nowadays are supposedly so fragile.
---
I do all the work on adolescent suicide in my spare time and it has nothing to do with furthering my career, which is in math education. I would greatly appreciate if you'd at least read what I've written on the subject in the past (see https://theshoresofacademia.blogspot.com/) so I do not have to spend time -- which for me is very limited -- having to respond by repeating what I've already stated long ago.
I hope you will consider diving into the suicide clusters at schools (and other places kids congregate). I’d be interested to see if you found any relationship between size of the student body and competitiveness of the environment. I know both The Palo Alto High School and NYU had some of the higher profile clusters in the past decade or so.
Unfortunately I do not know of public data that would allow such an analysis, if you come across please let me know. There are of course some case studies of suicide teen contagion, but I've seen no general study linking the size of high schools etc. with suicide, at least in the U.S.
I knew there was a spike in the 1980s…thanks for surfacing data…the current problem is not in fact new…but most likely has a different causal mix…
Interesting. It may very well be cyclical. See "The Fourth Turning" by Strauss and Howe, for example.