Have killings among teens increased?
I keep reading online discussions in which people assume that there’s been a big increase in teen killings, both murder and suicide. It’s taken almost as a given, but I rarely if ever see anyone citing statistics to back up the assertions.
So of course I tried to look it up. First question: has there been a rise in teen suicide? Answer: no and yes (the following quotes are from an article dated November 2017):
An increase in suicide rates among US teens occurred at the same time social media use surged and a new analysis suggests there may be a link.
Suicide rates for teens rose between 2010 and 2015 after they had declined for nearly two decades, according to data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Why the rates went up isn’t known.
The study doesn’t answer the question, but it suggests that one factor could be rising social media use.
What I get out of that is that for two decades suicide rates had been declining among teens, and there’s a recent uptick. Not only can the recent uptick not be explained, but I would guess that the previous two-decade decline cannot be explained, either. But I doubt most of you were aware of that decline; I wasn’t.
If you think that the strength of marriage and family has decreased over those decades, it certainly doesn’t seem to have been reflected in an increase in the suicide rates among teens. And as for the recent uptick, does it even begin to compare with the high figures from the 90s?
An organization called Child Trends tracks those statistics, and here’s a chart that shows suicides and homicides by teens aged 15-19 (as well as teen victims of homicides) from the 1970s to 2014, which should include most of the years involved in that uptick:
It’s a pretty shocking chart. What was going on with homicides and gun deaths from 1988 to 2000? I’m sure you can generate theories—and social scientists certainly have—but no one knows. One leading theory is, of course, that the widespread use of antidepressants was a highly contributing factor, but research does not indicate that was the case.
As for the line on the chart for suicides, the suicide bulge for those years was much much smaller and more gradual, with a gradual decline and then another slight upward climb that hasn’t reached the previous levels. Note that the chart only applies to teens between 15 and 19 years of age, although I am fairly sure that those are the peak teen years for those behaviors.
But it matters which age groups we’re talking about, because it turns out that between the ages of 15-24 suicides actually declined during that same period roughly corresponding to the 90s:
Before 1990, youth suicide rates in the U.S. had increased over the course of several decades. The rates were said to have tripled between 1953 and 1957 and between 1983 and 1987, rising from 2.46 to 9.64 per 100,000 persons 15 to 24 years of age; however, the increase might not have been as great as was initially believed, owing to a possible undercounting of youth suicides.7 Starting in 1990, however, the suicide rate in the U.S. among youths and young adults between 10 and 24 years of age began declining steadily, falling from 9.48 to 6.78 per 100,000 persons between 1990 and 2003.8 Yet between 2003 and 2004, the suicide rate increased by 8%, to 7.32 per 100,000””the largest single-year increase since 1990.
So how can we even generalize about this?
What’s more, here’s what that author has to say about the effect of SSRI prescriptions on the phenomenon:
It may be no coincidence that the long decline in youth suicide rates in the U.S. began soon after the start of the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) era, which started in 1987 with the introduction of fluoxetine (Prozac, Lilly)…
In many countries, a correlation has been found between increases in prescriptions for newer antidepressants and decreased suicide rates. However, the experience has been the opposite in Iceland and Norway, where suicide rates have risen or have remained unchanged even as antidepressant prescribing increased substantially. None of these studies establish a causal relationship between antidepressant use and suicide rates, of course, and many other factors can affect suicide rates…But the preponderance of the ecological evidence points to a potential protective effect for antidepressants with respect to suicide.
Not long after SSRIs were introduced, however, an unsettling thought was raised: that instead of protecting patients, SSRIs might have resulted in a number of suicides…
In the U.S., concerns about antidepressants led the FDA in 2004 to require the addition of a boxed warning to the labeling of these medications. This warning mentioned an increased risk of suicidal thoughts and behaviors in association with the use of antidepressants in pediatric patients. More recently, the boxed warning was revised to include young adults up to 24 years of age.
Both versions of the warning discuss the need to carefully monitor patients who begin treatment with antidepressants; incidentally, such advice had been given to clinicians long before the advent of SSRIs. The current version also mentions that depression and other psychiatric disorders are themselves associated with an increased risk of suicide. Recently, however, concern has grown that instead of promoting the monitoring of patients who initiate antidepressants, these well-intentioned actions have had unintended consequences: underdiagnosis and under-treatment of depression in patients of all ages and increased suicide rates in young people, following years of steady decline in the suicide rate.
I’ll leave it there for now. Books could be written on the subject, and no doubt have. But I’m not going to be writing one this afternoon.
I’ll throw my hat into the ring and note the crack epidemic took off in the late 80s and into the early 90s, though that doesn’t explain the graph’s peak in the mid-nineties. Perhaps that was gang activity created by crack as a lagging indicator.
It would be interesting to see the graph broken out for race and location. If the numbers for blacks or Los Angeles (ground zero for the crack epidemic and the Bloods/Crips gangs) were removed, I wonder how those curves would look.
If one looks further down the page of the Child Trends graph, one finds the current numbers broken down by race and one can see the black homicide/firearm death rates are horrifically higher than all other groups.
https://www.childtrends.org/?indicators=teen-homicide-suicide-and-firearm-deaths
I think the social sciences are in disarray at the moment. Econtalk has a lot couple of good podcasts on this, specifically p-hacking. Another one might be their interview with the author of weapons of math destruction.
As I said, polling shows 65% of registered voters think gun crimes have increased. I’m fairly certain that’s because of news coverage, and our tendency to remember negative experiences better than positive experiences.
I’ve been looking at a lot of numbers from the St’ Louis Fed recently, and it’s quite annoying because quite often the numbers in their publications don’t add up. So you have to go to the data sets themselves. I was try to check their calculations on tax burden, going off an article they published. But when you added up the tax burden of each quintile, it came out to 102%. The error was because of rounding, I suppose.
I strongly think that this perception is driven by saturation news coverage and more importantly social media.
Just have a conversation about some crime with an acquaintance and you can shortly expect the focus to turn to how scary and violent the times are now as opposed to the past.
Had a conversation with my sister about how her grandson can’t walk to school in their smallish town anymore because it may not be safe. When pointed out that it was statistically much more dangerous in the 80s, 90s when her son was walking to school in the same town the response is ‘well it just seems scarier’.
And with fear of sounding sexist my experience is this is mostly a female driven phenomenon.
Perceptions of gun violence are also influenced by outright lies (“18 school shootings in 2018”) and the astroturfed hysteria following the Parkland shooting.
https://www.snopes.com/2018/02/16/how-many-school-shootings-in-2018/
http://thefederalist.com/2018/03/01/take-two-weeks-truth-emerge-parkland-students-astroturfing/
Huxley,
‘outright lies and the astroturfed hysteria’
And that is where social media comes in to repeat the lies and hysteria over and over and over.
huxley:
Yes, I noticed that chart with the extremely high statistics for black homicides. And yet these days the left is only concerned about the tiny number that occur at the hands of police.
That chart is very sobering.
I’m reminded of the ‘Butterfield Effect’.
‘More inmates, despite drop in crime’ was the famous headline.
Yes, I noticed that chart with the extremely high statistics for black homicides. And yet these days the left is only concerned about the tiny number that occur at the hands of police.
neo: Some years ago I checked the DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics for 2005 violent crimes broken out by race for perp/victims and discovered jaw-dropping numbers for black-on-white vs white-on-black violence:
White-on-Black-completed-violence-cases: 9,025
Black-on-White–completed-violence-cases: 131,006
White-on-Black-sexual-assault-cases: 10
Black-on-White–sexual-assault-cases: 37,460
Thus even though whites outnumbered blacks by nearly a factor of six in 2005, black were committing violence against whites in far larger numbers. Going per capita, it’s much worse.
To a Martian observer it might appear blacks are waging an undeclared race war on whites.
A few years ago, after being annoyed by Ta-Nehisi Coates going on and on about whites “breaking the black body,” I went back to the BJS to check those numbers again and discovered the Obama administration had removed from the DOJ database all the breakouts, past and present, for perp/victim by race.
Fortunately I saved a pdf of the 2005 report.
Interesting things about the suicide/homicide and”firearm-related” deaths, the data and graph given by Neo:
-the suicide plot is pretty flat, and despite the cited high/low numbers, there are no statistical evaluations given.
-the homicide and firearm-death plots are rather parallel, the gap between them being pretty constant over time despite the transient big upward spike in both as shown. If one were a social “scientist”, one might thus propose that SSRIs caused homicides as well as suicides. That would make SSRIs and their evil Big Pharma makers doubly guilty.
I doubt SSRIs are “responsible” for either homicides and suicides. The bad news is that SSRIs are only twice as effective as placebos in relieving depression. Not exactly a big leap forward, though my brother the shrink dispenses them with both hands; even wanted our elderly mother, dying of cancer and heart disease, to take Risperdal in her last 90 days, because she musta been depressed.
If one were a social “scientist”, one might thus propose that SSRIs caused homicides as well as suicides.
Frog: Critics claim SSRIs can cause violence towards others as well as suicide.
IMO it’s entirely possible in individual cases. Serotonin receptors are everywhere in the nervous system, we don’t understand the interactions as well as the PR suggests, thus the SSRI warning lists as long as your arm.
Dr. Peter Breggin led off his book, “Talking Back to Prozac,” with the case of a woman who developed tardive dyskinesia — uncontrollable tics, in her case facial — from Prozac. It’s unusual but it happens.
http://www.mdmag.com/medical-news/tardive-dyskinesia-highly-prevalent-with-certain-nonantipsychotic-medication
In aggregate however the effects of SSRIs are not a slam-dunk for harm or effectiveness. Some people do benefit and given the stakes of depression, that’s great news.
A trained physician is required. Treatment with SSRIs is often a trial-and-error journey to discover which SSRI at what dosage, possibly in combination with other drugs, best fits the individual patient at a given time.
Eyeballing the graph it looked to me like the firearms deaths curve was the sum of the lower two curves. Adding the actual numbers, it appears that the top curve is maybe 20% lower than the sum. Remember that an accidental firearm death is a homicide. (Unless you shot yourself accidentally?)
Guessing that firearms are big factor, the fed. gun control history indicates that legislation after the assassinations JFK, RFK, MLK etc., 1968, clamped down significantly on guns like “Saturday night specials” only to be loosened in 1986. Some Sat. night specials were unsafe, and some were perfectly OK, just cheap.
Having a firearm in the house, especially a loaded one is a serious responsibility and many don’t take seriously enough. Plus many want that handgun in the nightstand ready to go at a moment’s notice.
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I recall going on a big in-law family trip, including the two big Orlando theme parks and a Caribbean cruise, in Aug. 2003. The theme park workers talked about how we tourists were at the beginning of a travel resurgence after a tremendous post 9/11 tourism drought. I wonder if that could be connected to that curious blip in the 2004 suicide number? A bunker mentality in the collective unconscious?
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The “professionals” that I’ve read definitely say that anti-depressants are a net positive in reducing suicides. But that is not inconsistent with a very tiny percentage becoming unhinged. Even if all of the spree/rampage killers are lumped together it is still a tiny percentage of the violent crime deaths. It is also very unlikely that drugs were a direct cause of the Las Vegas or Parkland shootings, even though both probably had exposure to anti-depressants. The former was too old, and the latter had been off his meds for a considerable while.
What causes more teen deaths than anything else is alcohol and automobiles. Had a case here recently where three high school students were drinking and went off the road into a tree and two were killed. I used to work in Germany on an Army contract and we had to obtain Army license plates and driver licenses. We received a briefing on German highway fatalities which were very high, and the American fatality rates were even higher. I was surprised until I found out the average age of the GIs was about 22 years old. Who has the highest highway fatality rate in the US, males 18-25 years old.
TommyJay:
I regret to differ with you about the usefulness of SSRIs. Most depressions eventually reverse without therapy, which is why placebos work 20-25% of the time, vs, SSRI’s 45-50%. That makes them a net positive, as you say. But assigning a causative effect on a ‘very tiny’ percent becoming unhinged due to, or while taking SSRIs is a bridge too far. Those dots do not connect.
Black teenagers have been killing anything and everything in Demoncrat inner city fiefdoms for how long now…
But the Left was scared that the counter insurgency methods used in Iraq would be applied to their cities. Good thing they got rid of that problem by sabotaging OIF.