The startling new realities raised by injecting race and economic contexts into the “teen suicide” and social-media furor
And the disgraceful reason authorities avoid talking about them.
Source: Centers for Disease Control, 2024.
Americans have suffered major increases in self-destructive behaviors over the last two decades. The latest, 2022 and 2023 figures indicate these continue to worsen.
Unfortunately, remedial action to address this tragic trend has been hampered by authorities’ insistence that analysis of stigmatized behaviors like suicide and addiction must be limited to stigmatized groups like teenagers and minorities, and only to selected, narrow measures, time periods, and culture-war issues designed to uphold popular prejudices. It is forbidden to identify a social problem, no matter what its reality, with more powerful, older White constituencies.
This severe limitation is even more devastating since self-destruction rose among all races, sexes, and income levels – in fact, teens show the least troubling trends.
The obvious realities
Figures 1 and 2 show the key measure of self-destruction, self-inflicted deaths (suicides and overdoses), measured across all of America’s 3,100 counties.* Age 40-49 is compared to teens, a similar-sized group of age to be their parents and grownups around them. To my knowledge, such analysis has not been done before.
This analysis is deliberately biased against teens in two ways. First, all suicide and overdose deaths for age 10-19 are divided by the population age 15-19 so that the low-risk age 10-14 doesn’t dilute overall teen death rates and make trends less visible. Second, the time period chosen, 2010 through 2021, is the one those who blame social media for teen suicide use to maximize the image of teen risks (selecting only those time periods, behaviors, and measures that make teens appear worst is standard practice).
Even with this biasing, teens remain at low risk of self-destruction compared to their parent-age group.
How obvious realities get ignored and trivial ones hyped
The real pattern is striking. Teen girls, the focus of an intense fear campaign, actually show the least increase and lowest rates of suicide and self-destruction. The increase, up 5.9 annual self-destructive deaths for lower-income and 1.9 for higher income girls, is among the lowest of any race, gender, and income level.
In fact, America’s increased self-destruction is centered in 30-aged and middle-aged White men. That’s a politically disastrous reality for politicians, interest groups, and media, which traditionally identify social crises with feared, powerless immigrant, minority, and young populations (White youth may be included if “corrupted” by external forces).
More precisely, self-destruction, led by overdose, is strongly a feature of low economic status, White race, male gender, and 30-60 age levels. Commonly referred to as “deaths of despair,” previous researchers have centered analysis on White, and more recently Nonwhite, middle agers acceptable to discuss only because poorer ones show the worst trends.
Among low-income groups, self-destructive deaths rose four times faster among parent ages to levels three times higher than among teens over the 2010-2021 period. Among high-income groups, these self-inflicted deaths increased around three times faster to rates three times higher among 40-age than teen age groups. Whites and men show higher rates and more extreme trends than Nonwhites and women, with middle-income groups in between.
Those who insist on narrowly blaming all troubles on teens with Smartphones and screens are now insisting the vastly larger, skyrocketing epidemic of grownup self-destruction couldn’t possibly be making teens more depressed. This notion is as bizarre as it sounds.
Psychologist Jean Twenge, commendable for at least tackling some economic nuance, illustrates how not to analyze it. Her picking of only limited measures and geographies obscures rather than illuminates key trends, which is why she is able to simultaneously state, “there is no denying that drug overdoses have soared among American adults,” but that “it seems extremely unlikely that drug overdoses, drug abuse, or depression among parents is the primary cause of the rise in teen depression since 2010… This is its own crisis – we don’t need to tie it to the increase in teen depression to pay attention to it.”
That makes no sense. Is Twenge arguing today’s teens are a super-stoic species who would simply shrug off parents’ and nearby adults’ widespread deaths, hospital emergencies, arrests, and related addiction crises? Nearly 800,000 middle-aged adults died from overdoses from 2010 through 2021, and a staggering 5 million adults ages 26-44 were admitted to hospital ERs for drug-related crises in 2022 alone. Perhaps we should ask teens whether they find that depressing.
The millions of teenagers who live amid drug/alcohol-troubled parents and other grownups don’t enjoy the luxury to pick and choose whether to “pay attention” to such “soaring” troubles. Nor do they get to dismiss the economic troubles they and adults around them face. It’s past time for authorities and commentators to join the real world.*
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