To read the newspapers or watch the television news-magazine programs, you would assume that the United States is in the midst of an epidemic of adolescent suicides.
It is true that the suicide rate per one hundred thousand fifteen- to twenty-four-year-olds more than tripled between 1950 and 1994, from 4.5 to 13.8. However, the ostensibly higher incidence of suicides may partly reflect more accurate identification by local coroners. And the good news is that even if we accept those figures at face value, from 1994 to 1997 the rate fell steadily to 11.4 suicides per one hundred thousand, the lowest number recorded since the 1970s.
In the National Longitudinal Study on Adolescent Health, which polled some twelve thousand middle-school and high-school students, nearly nine in ten reported never having so much as entertained the thought of suicide in the past year. Still, mothers and fathers should never let these comforting statistics lull them into a false sense of security. Approximately 250,000 U.S. teenagers attempted to end their lives, with twenty-one hundred boys and girls between the ages of ten and nineteen completing the act.
