CDC reports 25 percent drop in suicide rate among teens

SUN STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS

Friday, June 11, 2004 | 10:52 a.m.

SUN STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS

ATLANTA -- The rate at which teenagers commit suicide took a sharp dip during the 1990s, the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday, dropping by 25 percent between 1992 and 2001.

But the same nationwide survey of death certificates that returned the good news of fewer suicides contained a troubling coda: The methods by which teens commit suicide are changing.

In the early 1990s, teens' suicides overwhelmingly involved guns. By 2001 a significant proportion were due to suffocation or hanging; among 10- to 14-year-olds, death by suffocation was twice as common as gun deaths.

Researchers at the CDC were surprised by the shift. They said that finding an explanation will be an urgent priority, because suicide-prevention programs have a better chance of succeeding when they are tailored to what teens are attempting.

"We know from earlier research a little bit about the factors that play a role in why an individual picks a particular method," said Dr. Alex Crosby, a medical epidemiologist with the CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention. "What we don't know from this particular study is what changed -- acceptability of a method, or availability."

About 4,200 teens and young adults die by suicide each year in the United States, and an additional 124,000 attempt suicide in a manner serious enough to bring them to an emergency room but survive. Despite the drop noted Thursday -- from 6.2 to 4.6 deaths per 100,000 members of that age group -- suicide remains the third-leading cause of death among American youth.

"The trend is certainly going in the right direction, but suicide is still a major public health problem," said Nadine Kaslow, a professor of psychiatry at Emory University School of Medicine and chief psychologist at Grady Memorial Hospital.

Nevada's teen suicide rate has been among the highest in the nation. In 1998, the latest year for which figures are available, there were 13.8 suicides for every 100,000 teens.

On the 2003 Nevada Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which is used by the CDC for the federal study, the number of high school students who reported attempting suicide dropped to 8.8 percent from 10.7 percent in 2001. The percentage of high school students who said they had considered suicide also declined, to 18.1 percent from 19.6 percent.

But there was an increase in students -- at both the middle school and high school level -- who said they had felt sad or hopeless enough in the prior 12 months to stop doing regular activities. At the local district level Clark County saw a similar pattern, with a decrease in reported suicide attempts and suicidal thoughts but a rise in students who said they had felt depressed.

In an attempt to address the teen suicide rate, the Nevada Board of Education teamed up with the state's health division earlier this year to create the Center for Health and Learning, which will target adolescent issues including depression, nutrition and drug and alcohol use.

The center is also coordinating a new depression screening program, devised by Columbia University, that helps schools identify students with mental health issues. The program, TeenScreen, has been used on a pilot basis at six Clark County School District campuses since 2002.

Schools do play a role in suicides, the CDC said Thursday.

Of the 126 violent deaths that took place at elementary and high schools between 1994 and 1999, including the Columbine shootings, 28 -- more than one-fifth -- were suicides.

Eight of those suicides killed or injured at least one other person at the school before killing themselves.

High school students who attempt suicide are four times more likely than other students to have been in fights in the past year, the CDC said in a third survey. Sun reporter

Emily Richmond and Cox News Service contributed to this story.