Youth Suicides in Utah
Political science professor Benjamin Knoll has put together an analysis of suicides among those 15-19 years old as correlated with the Mormon percentage of states’ populations. (link) There are elements of his analysis that are odd and unhelpful for understanding anything, but the one big fact at the heart of his data is interesting to me. The suicide rate for this age group in Utah is double what it was five years ago. Eight years ago, during the run-up to Prop. 8, I spent some time looking at the same data source (WISQARS) and debunking an incorrect rumor that Utah’s rate of youth suicide was the highest in the nation. Utah’s rate was high then, but not the highest.
Now, however, Utah’s rate of teenage suicide is exceeded only by those of Wyoming, Alaska, and North Dakota. That’s not good company to keep. The number of suicides among 15-19 year olds in Utah for the years 1999-2011 ranged between 22 and 28, except for 2005 which only recorded 18. Then for 2012, 2013, and 2014 there were 37, 36, and 55 suicides giving rates of 16.9, 16.1 and 24.3 per 100,000. Suicide, especially among teenagers, is an extreme and rare action, and so the count could be spuriously variable from year to year, but an elevated rate three consecutive years seems meaningful to me.
Utah’s suicides are peculiarly believed by anti-Mormon homophiles to be dominated by homosexuals driven to despair by Mormons. If 1 in 40 people were homosexual and the suicide rate among them were 39 times that of heterosexuals, then they would amount to half of suicides. I don’t doubt that people who perform homosexual acts would also kill themselves to a disproportionate extent, but I doubt it’s the main factor in the world leading people to the grave sin of self-slaughter.
So, setting some people’s obsessions aside, what could be at work with a doubling of Utah’s teen suicide rate, starting in 2012? Here’s my speculation: the Mormon moment didn’t go so good for some. For the better-functioning among us, the attention could be weathered and the bad balanced against the good. For the least stable though, it was too much being an acceptable target for ridicule and labeled as un-American bigots. And then a year after a profane, vulgar Broadway show centered on Mormon missionaries was lauded as the year’s best musical, the mission age was lowered, bringing the conflict even closer to our youth.
I don’t really know Utah, though. What’s going one could be the JV version of the White Death that’s been making the news, or something more unique to the state and not obvious from outside.
JimD
March 15, 2016
How about the knowledge that we live in a Babylonian cesspool where people would knowingly, deliberately select Barack Obama rather than Mitt Romney as their president?
(Tongue only partially in cheek . . .)
G.
March 15, 2016
That’s not a persuasive explanation, except that no explanation really is. could it just be an anomalously high year?
John Mansfield
March 15, 2016
Anomalously high year? That was my first thought since the number of suicides under consideration had averaged only a couple dozen a year. Here’s the sequence of numbers of suicide from 1999 to 2014:
27, 27, 26, 27, 28, 27, 18, 22, 23, 25, 26, 26, 24, 37, 36, 55
Per 100,000 the rates are:
12.3, 12.5, 12.1, 12.7, 13.4, 13.0, 8.6, 10.4, 10.7, 11.5, 11.8, 11.8, 11.0, 16.9, 16.1, 24.3
I think the three-year sequence for 2012, 2013, 2014 indicates something more than statistical fluctuation.
Bruce Charlton
March 15, 2016
@JM – Before becoming too conjectural – I would look at the reasonably well established causes of suicide.
The main causes of suicide are serious and rare mental illnesses – e.g. melancholic and psychotic depression, and mania; or drugs – e.g. alcohol, SSRI-type ‘antidepressants’, antipsychotics.
My guess is that prescriptions for antidepressents and antipsychotics will have surged – this not being related to the presence of actual mental illness but to marketing. Prescriptions have have gone up everywhere, but maybe for some reason more in Utah. A new psychiatric facility bringing in people from outside?
The extraordinarily high prevalence of psychiatric problems is caused by, not cured by, extraordinarily high and rising rates of drug prescriptions – see David Healy – Pharmageddon; Robert Whitaker – Anatomy of an Epidemic.
A wave of migrants with higher suicide rates?
Another possibility is something different about the way data is collected – new guidelines, personnel…
My point is that the mechanisms suggested by you and others are purely conjectural – such factors are not known to be causal of suicide – you first need to look at known causes of suicide.
Andrew
March 16, 2016
Could the high rate of professionals lead to higher prescription rates? If most people assume that professionals are good and needed for their children to have the best, and those in Utah are especially good at seeing to their children’s care, it could incidentally lead to higher rates of unnecessary prescriptions.
John Mansfield
March 16, 2016
Well put, BC. Trying to tease out how our pet concerns are affecting society by examining suicides is a foolish task. The recent detection of gravitational radiation by LIGO comes to mind, which required three things: 1) a decades-long, multi-billion dollar creation of precise measurement systems, 2) a robust model (general relativity) that could make measurements down to parts per 10^22 meaningful, 3) the merger of a couple black holes putting out as much energy in gravitational radiation as the rest of the visible universe was putting out as light for that fraction of a second. Looking at suicides, we don’t have any of those three, not the precise measurement, not the robust theory to link a chain of causation, and not the massive event. On the other hand, suicide is a 1 in 10,000 signal not 1 in 10^22, so the measurement, theory, and cause don’t have to be so extremely precise, robust, and massive.
Suicide is a rare event, so a change in the rate has much more to do with how people respond to stress then with the stresses themselves. My proposed explanation of Utah’s increase is somewhat pointless in that way, but at least has the virtue of looking for something influencing a big chunk of a population, as opposed to wondering how the difference between a 5% LDS population and a 3% LDS population plays out in number of suicides, or thinking that a state’s suicide rate is largely a measure of how the homosexuals are feeling.
JimD
March 16, 2016
Actually, they were just saying on the radio here a day or two ago that Utah alcohol sales spiked last year . . .
Fraggle
March 16, 2016
The Gay Oppression theory would need to explain not just why there has been a recent increase, but also why it was not preceded by a massive drop as the wider culture changed. You would expect the rate to start from a much higher base if the theory were true.
Paul Mouritsen
March 16, 2016
There does appear to be a fairly strong link between youth suicide and the availability of guns. The inter mountain west is the epicenter for gun culture, but that is not unique to Utah. It would be interesting to look at the means used in these suicides.