American teenagers' quiet despair

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This article suggests some possible reasons but gives nothing really definitive to explain the reason for the 70% increase in teen suicide. Something is wrong, but I don’t know what, and I’m not sure if anyone is paying attention.

I’ve never really believed that the school years were the happiest or most carefree—even in what we might call the “good old days.” My own recollection of my youth at a time of general prosperity and social stability is that the school years were often happy yet often subject to persistent bouts of worry and melancholy. I remember reading a comment by Winston Churchill that he had a very happy life “except, of course, for the terrible school years.” The things I worried about then would have seemed insignificant to adults. But what is causing kids now to be so much more depressed? What is making them so unhappy as to be despairing of life?

 
It seem to me that the reasons for the 70% increase in teen suicide are complex and numerous.

Perhaps one of the biggest causes is a stark lack of meaning in some teen’s lives.
When life is very painful and reasons to live seem utterly lacking, suicide is a drastic “solution” that some teens’s will turn to in order to put an end to the suffering and meaninglessness of their lives. A world that has lost Faith is, to a large degree, a world in which authentic meaning has become extinct, or at least gone underground. Teen life is tenuous enough without adding a hardship that for many is unbearable.
 
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Very interesting. Contrary to what the author says, Millennials are rather less likely to kill themselves as teenagers than are Gen-Xers and Boomers, which undercuts the hypothesis that being raised in a digital era is causing a major increase in suicide.

I’d love to see pre-1950 statistics, but if the real increase since 1950–and especially 1960–is different from those pre-1950 statistics, I think that “loss of meaning” sounds very plausible.
 
Here’s an article from 1987.


“Some counselors hint at a link between suicide and the playthings of the 1980’s: personal computers, VCR’s and stereos. ‘‘Perhaps the move to a technocratic society and its inherent insensitivities to human emotion have caused an increased sense of hopelessness,’’ wrote three counselors, J. Kent Griffiths, O. William Farley and Mark W. Fraser, in the Journal of Independent Social Work last year.”

But most of the article focuses on the breakdown of society: "But for many teen-agers a traditional family structure no longer exists, and the divorce, separation or remarriage of parents has created new pressures.

‘‘The things that used to keep people together and give kids a sense that things were going to be O.K. are just not available today,’’ said Dr. Michael Roy, director of the adolescent unit at the McCauley Neuropsychiatric Institute at St. Mary’s Hospital in San Francisco."
 
Back when I was a teen, I felt like the odd man out, that I did not fit in. I saw other people who were prettier, taller, had better hair or fancier clothes and assumed they felt so happy.

Today, teens have social media where they are bombasted with literally millions of people who seem prettier, taller, fancier, happier than they are.

When I was a teen, we had a sense of self esteem because we had been allowed to fail at some things. Mom and dad did not swoop in and make play dates when we were little, manage our social lives, get in the middle of rifts with friends, insist teachers change our grades.

We tried out for a play or a baseball team, some people did not make the try outs. We learned how to fail and recover from it. We even sometimes had to do summer school because we failed a class or had to miss out on an extracurricular activity because we could not afford it.

We were expected to do chores around the house and we suffered the punishment if we did not. We were expected to get an after school/summer job to pay for extras, we could not drive until we could pay for our own car insurance.

Now, kids think that one failure is literally the end of the world, they have no sense of scale when it comes to emotions.
 
Even though it dropped since 1990, it’s still significantly higher than 1950.
But there’s another element worth considering. The graph above is the rate of teens committing suicide. In actual numbers, it’s possible it’s been increasing with the growth of the American population.
To demonstrate, an example would be there are 100 teens in Year x, 5 commit suicide so 5% committed suicide. In Year z, there are 200 teens and 10 commit suicide. The number of suicides doubled but the percentage is still 5%.
If things are improving, it should continue to decline not stabilize in the graph. Theoretically.
 
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the subsumption of countless facets of what used to be ordinary life into technology and the disappearance of meaningful work;
Click to expand...
This is what I think is the single biggest cause. One often overlooked side effect of this is a large decrease in physical activity, which is just as bad for the mind as it is for the body.
 
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There have been several suicides at my son’s high school, and one at his former middle school that feeds into it, this year. Our ED is full lately of adolescent kids needing psych beds. There were more suicides during one semester at my son’s school than all 6 years his sister ( who is six years older) attended 7-12 grade in the same school/s just a few years earlier.

Then the increased attempts, and getting more violent…and not just our district.

Something is definitely very wrong.
 
ATraveller said:
Let’s go further back.
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/07/fc/a8/07fca8259294b6f2ca664e62277ef070.jpg
Teen suicide: Prevention is contagious, too. - CSMonitor.com
Click to expand...
That graph is interesting because it reflects the link between cannabis use which peaked in the 1990’s among youth and the increase in suicidal ideation. It’s criminal the way the statistics are fudged to advance the legalization agenda. Regular cannabis use robs the young person of potential and hope. It’s a dreadful scourge.

The Growth in Marijuana Use Among American Youths During the 1990s and the Extent of Blunt Smoking
 
No, the graph shows rate “per 100,000,” not an absolute increase in numbers.

Yes, I agree that the rate is higher than that for 1950, but they didn’t have Facebook in the zenith of this increase, meaning that maybe today’s increased electronic immersion isn’t causing quite the epidemic that the first article implies; also, Millennials are less likely to kill themselves as teenagers than are Gen X-ers and Boomers. So, all of this “Children are more fragile today than they used to be” may be true, but the article that started this thread does not prove it at all.
 
The actual number of suicides is most likely increasing because ‘per 100,000’ is really just a percentage, used when the percent value has ‘too many’ decimals. Rates/percentages/proportions are used to hold population growth constant in this context. The drawback is they don’t show the real number but with the correct numbers, which I don’t have, one could reverse calculate.
That’s not needed since I could find these:
For 2016, 5723 Americans aged 15-24 committed suicide.


For 2014, it was 5079 for the same age range.


For 2005, 4202 for the same age range.

 
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Not sure what the point is. A rate, rather than an “n,” is the correct way to report trends in a population. An increase in number of suicides that’s owing only to an increase in population means that individual teens are no likelier than previous teens to commit suicide. You have shown that there’s a plateau in the rate of suicide among Millenials, rather than an increase.
 
I’m stressing there are still more lives being lost despite the rate looking like there’s an improvement. A stable suicide rate isn’t good news just better than one rising. Yes, the likelihood of suicide is lower today but the number of suicides should be independent of population growth.
 
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