According to stereotype, yes. But not according to the data.
I’ve finally returned to my old suicide project, which had been moldering in a (virtual) drawer for quite a long time. With the help of a new co-author, I’ve been analyzing the results of a bunch of regressions. I was surprised to note that the variable for teenagers (percent of population from 10 to 19) consistently yielded negative coefficients, meaning higher teen population is associated with lower suicide rates. So I went back to the original data source (imagine that!) and found that the stereotype is dead wrong: suicide rates are notably lower for teenagers than adults.
Suicide rates do rise throughout the teen years, but they plateau at about age 20 and remain flat throughout the years 20 to 65. Then they jump again for the 65+ demographic.
So what explains the misperception? I glanced over the web resources on teen suicide, and by the numbers they technically do not seem to err. They note that suicides rates rise during the teen years, which is true, but it doesn’t indicate a particular problem among teens, because (as the graph shows) suicide rates remain high for adults. They also note that suicide constitutes a large percent of deaths among teens, but this is not terribly surprising, since teens are less likely to die of things like heart disease and cancer.
ADDENDUM: In case you're wondering, teen suicide rates have not been rising, either. They've been in decline since the late 1980s. (For this graph, I had to go beyond the years 1981-1998, which WISQARS maintains separately.)
[UPDATE: Graphic mysteriously deleted by Blogger now restored.]
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Do Teens Commit Suicide More Often?
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
Thomas's Dissent on Physician-Assisted Suicide
Good news: The Supreme Court has just upheld Oregon’s physician-assisted suicide law, saying it does not violate the federal Controlled Substances Act (CSA). Here’s the decision.
Interestingly, four justices who shot down federalism in favor of a more expansive interpretation of the CSA in Raich v. Gonzalez (the medical marijuana case) took the opposite position today. Those justices were Stevens, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Souter, who deserve praise for their good decision today but castigation for their inconsistency. Two justices, Kennedy and O’Connor, get points for both correctness and consistency, having supported federalism (and thus the narrow application of the CSA) in both cases. One justice, Scalia, gets points for consistency alone, as he took the wrong side in both cases. And even those points should be docked for inconsistency with Scalia’s expressed support for federalism in earlier cases. (Chief Justice Roberts joined Scalia's dissent, but wasn't on the Court for the Raich case.)
And then there’s the anomaly: Justice Thomas, who supported federalism and a narrow reading of the CSA in Raich, but took the opposite position today. Like David Beito and Radley Balko, I was perplexed, so I read Thomas’s dissent. The good news is that Thomas still believes in the right principles; the bad news is that he has bad strategy. Here’s the key passage (emphasis mine):
I agree with limiting the applications of the CSA in a manner consistent with the principles of federalism and our constitutional structure. Raich, supra, at ___ (THOMAS, J., dissenting)... But that is now water over the dam. The relevance of such considerations was at its zenith in Raich, when we considered whether the CSA could be applied to the intrastate possession of a controlled substance consistent with the limited federal powers enumerated by the Constitution. Such considerations have little, if any, relevance where, as here, we are merely presented with a question of statutory interpretation, and not the extent of constitutionally permissible federal power. This is particularly true where, as here, we are interpreting broad, straightforward language within a statutory framework that a majority of this Court has concluded is so comprehensive that it necessarily nullifies the States’ “ ‘traditional . . . powers . . . to protect the health, safety, and welfare of their citizens.’ ”2 Raich, supra, at ___, n. 38 (slip op., at 27, n. 38). The Court’s reliance upon the constitutional principles that it rejected in Raich—albeit under the guise of statutory interpretation—is perplexing to say the least. Accordingly, I respectfully dissent.In short, Thomas deferred to the precedent set by Raich – a precedent with which he disagreed and that the majority implicitly rejected in the present case. This makes sense, if we take as given the Court’s decision in this case to ignore the issue of federalism and focus entirely on the matter of statutory interpretation. But why not force the federalism issue onto the table? Thomas may have thought he was doing so by writing a dissent, but a concurring opinion would have been the more appropriate vehicle in this case. That way, he could have affirmed what he clearly believed was the right choice on constitutional grounds, while shining a spotlight on four other justices’ inconsistency. I suspect this would have been a better strategy for rehabilitating the principles that were so damaged by Raich.
Thursday, September 09, 2004
WHO's Business Is Suicide?
The World Health Organization is calling for action to deal with the growing problem of suicide worldwide:
Suicide kills more people each year than road traffic accidents in most European countries, the World Health Organization is warning. And globally, suicide takes more lives than murder and war put together, says the agency in a call for action.I have two complaints about this article. First, it claims that reducing access to suicide methods will reduce the suicide rate:
The death toll from suicide – at almost one million people per year – accounts for half of all violent deaths worldwide, says the WHO. “Estimates suggest fatalities could rise to 1.5 million by 2020,” the agency warned on Wednesday.
"It's important to realise that suicide is preventable," points out Lars Mehlum, president of the International Association for Suicide Prevention. "And that having access to the means of suicide is both an important risk factor and determinant of suicide."Now, if you’re going to make a claim like that, it would nice to have a little evidence. As it happens, I’ve done some research on this topic, and the evidence just isn’t there. Despite numerous studies, support for the conclusion that reducing access to a suicide method will reduce the suicide rate is mixed at best. Studies have frequently found a statistically significant relationship between access to a method and suicides by that method, but rarely have studies found a statistically significant relationship between access to a method and total suicides.
…
The most common methods for committing suicide include swallowing pesticides, using firearms and overdosing on painkillers. Curbing access to these methods is a crucial factor in preventing suicide.
Second, WHO abuses terminology to justify its prescription for global action:
"Suicide is a tragic global public health problem,” says Catherine Le Galès-Camus, WHO’s assistant director general for non-communicable diseases and mental health. “There is an urgent need for coordinated and intensified global action to prevent this needless toll."Now what, exactly, qualifies any given health issue as a “public health problem”? Suicide seems to me a quintessentially private matter. Yes, suicides do adversely affect the families, friends, and coworkers of the suicidal person. But the same is true of nearly anything that takes a person’s life, especially in a traumatic fashion. If the term “public health” is to have any meaning distinct from just “health,” either (a) there should be some non-trivial element of contagion involved, or (b) the issue should be closely connected to some public facility, such as the sewer system or public highways. At a minimum, the health problem should have substantially greater external effects than the typical illness.
Even if one buys that suicide is a public health problem – perhaps because suicides sometimes occur in clusters, indicating some degree of “psychological contagion” – what warrants WHO’s call for international action? Nothing about suicide makes it a “global” problem, except the mere fact that it occurs in every country. So does acne. Suicide is not transmitted from country to country. The suicide rate of one country is of no special concern to other countries, except in the trivial sense that compassionate people have a tendency to care about other humans’ deaths. Suicide is no more a matter of international concern than obesity – another fundamentally individual or (with a major stretch of the imagination) national concern that WHO has nonetheless dubbed a “public health problem” and a “global epidemic.” Looks like WHO has a chronic case of mission creep.
Saturday, August 14, 2004
Suicide Bombed
In my last post at Volokh, I promised to extend my economic theory of suicide to the case of suicide bombers. Over a month later, I’m finally getting around to it.
The story so far: I model the suicidal person as engaged in a search for suicide opportunities, akin to a job search or product search. The agent ranks the possible methods in order of desirability (e.g., guns are preferred to pills, pills are preferred to drowning). But some methods are more readily available than others, and waiting for a better method to come along means enduring a bit more of life’s misery. The model counter-intuitively predicts that decreased availability of a preferred method could increase the frequency of suicide, because the agent becomes more willing to employ the less-desirable but more-readily-available methods. (The job-search analogy: A worker is more likely to take a lousy job offer now if he’s unlikely to get a good job offer in the future.)
As I originally conceived the model, all the utility values are negative: life sucks, shooting yourself sucks, etc. The agent just tries to minimize the sum of suckiness. But actually, all the math goes through just as well with positive values. Imagine a would-be terrorist. He doesn’t necessarily hate his life – it has a net positive value – but he also anticipates great utility from the killing of infidels, enough so that he might be willing to sacrifice his life. The more dead infidels, the greater the utility. This provides a natural ranking of his suicide opportunities: a planeful of victims is preferred to a busful, a busful to a carful. But some opportunities are more readily available than others. A 9/11 takes months of preparation (at least), and only a few hijackers. Opportunities to bomb buses arise more often.
The conclusion? If increased security diminishes opportunities for “major” terrorist acts, the result could be increased frequency of “small” terrorist acts. Would-be terrorists, faced with fewer chances to commit big atrocities, become more likely to commit small ones. The total number of terrorist acts or victims could rise or fall. Example: The U.S. had (maybe still has) lousy airport security. We got 9/11. Meanwhile, Israel has had its airport security tight as a drum for decades. They get countless truck bombings, car bombings, restaurant bombings, etc.
I know, I know… that’s purely anecdotal evidence, and I wouldn’t claim otherwise. The U.S. and Israel differ in numerous important ways other than their airport security, including their size and their distance from the terrorist breeding grounds. It would be difficult, maybe impossible, to do a true controlled study. So there’s no proof here, but I think the comparison is suggestive.
Does the theory indicate that increasing airline security is a bad idea? Not necessarily, since the total effect is ambiguous. But at a minimum, we shouldn’t simply assume that increasing security in any given area will have reduce the incidence terrorism. If I worked for Homeland Security, I would anticipate an increase in the number of small-scale terrorist attacks that don’t involve airplanes.
Wednesday, May 26, 2004
Right to Die Lives On
Good news: a federal court just upheld Oregon’s physician-assisted suicide law against John Ashcroft’s challenge. This is not just a victory for the right to die; it is a smack in the face to the Bush administration’s fair-weather federalism. No word on whether the case will go to the Supreme Court.