ANOTHER TEEN SUICIDE SCAM

Updated September 6, 2007

Count on US health officials, the press, and allied researchers to sensationalize and trivialize the serious issue of suicide in order to push psychiatric and pharmaceutical interests. Declared the AP's obedient editorial/story on September 7:

A 22 percent drop in prescriptions for antidepressants for teens and children following government warnings about hazards of the drugs led to a sharp increase in suicides the following year, according to Chicago researchers. The change in labeling in 2003 warned that use of the drugs could increase suicidal thoughts and behavior among young people, but the labeling seems to have had the opposite effect, according to a report in the September issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry. In the year following the change in labeling, the suicide rate rose 14 percent among those younger than 19, the largest increase since the government started collecting suicide statistics in 1979, according to biostatistician Robert D. Gibbons and his colleagues at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

No evidence that the labeling requirement caused more teen suicide was presented, and any careful analysis of readily online data would have called it into question. In particular, as another AP story the same day reported:

The suicide rate among preteen and teenage girls rose to its highest level in a decade, and hanging surpassed guns as the preferred method, federal health officials reported Thursday. The report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests a surprising reversal in recent trends. The biggest jump — about 76 percent — was in the suicide rate for girls ages 10-14 from 2003 to 2004. There were 94 suicides in that age group in 2004, compared to 56 in 2003. That’s a rate of fewer than one per 100,000 population. Suicide rates among all American young people, ages 10 to 24, fell 28 percent from 1990-2003. But in 2004 it shot back up, driven largely by increases among females aged 10-19 and males aged 15-19.

In fact, suicides rose in 2004 not just among teen girls (up 132), but even more among adult women ages 40-49 (up 187) and 50-59 (up 128)--the ages to be their parents:

Suicides and rates among US females by age, 2004 vs 2003
	__Suicide rate__		___Suicides____		______Population______
Age	2004	2003	2004	2,003	2004	2003
10-14	0.95	0.54	98	56	10,307,570	10,339,627
15-19	3.52	2.66	355	265	10,092,051	9,964,570
20-24	3.59	3.39	365	342	10,169,701	10,085,111
25-29	4.15	4.00	397	375	9,562,793	9,376,922
30-34	5.28	5.20	535	534	10,127,610	10,266,012
35-39	6.26	5.72	656	611	10,480,333	10,682,265
40-44	7.89	7.37	915	853	11,591,724	11,570,056
45-49	8.87	7.88	994	869	11,203,891	11,032,003
50-54	8.37	7.45	834	725	9,960,786	9,729,389
55-59	6.62	6.71	562	543	8,487,134	8,096,677
60-64	5.48	4.93	361	313	6,590,985	6,342,534
65-69	3.68	4.00	196	209	5,324,869	5,219,286
70-74	3.86	3.60	182	172	4,717,422	4,774,219
75-79	4.26	3.99	184	174	4,318,227	4,363,230
80-84	3.46	3.93	119	132	3,443,505	3,361,102
85+	3.57	3.30	120	108	3,360,021	3,275,682
Source: Centers for Disease Control, WISQARS.

Note further that the female suicide rate among the parents is more than 8 times higher than for younger teens, and more than twice as high as for older teens. Were we to concentrate suicide prevention on the age groups and gender most "at risk," as the CDC argues, it would be middle-aged men, whose rates are 15 to 20 times higher than for teenage girls. But that's not the way our politicized health lobbies work.

A one-year change in suicide rates, up or down, does not merit the sweeping speculation by "experts" and the media about trends and causes--especially when it involves a rare event involving behavior change by fewer than 1 in 100,000 teens (or, in the case of 10-14 year-olds, a rise of 42 suicides in a population of 10.3 million, or 1 in 245,000). Further, if suicide among middle-aged adult women is also up, it suggests the warning labels on antidepressant drugs for teens is not the reason for the teen suicide rise in 2004. The crusade by drug industry supporters to loosen restrictions is especially troubling, given the hundreds of deaths from abuse of antidepressant drugs among all ages every year.

The biggest single predictor of a suicidal youth is a suicidal parent, along with families histories of drug abuse, violence, chaos, and mental illness. But "teen suicide" is a commodity, whose exploitation requires that questionable issues be emphasized and crucial ones ignored.