Suicide rates among teen girls are rising in Australia, Canada, and the UK
The cause of the adolescent mental health crisis can't be unique to the U.S.
Suicide is the most tragic outcome of the adolescent mental health crisis. It’s crucial to determine how widespread the increases in adolescent suicide are, both to understand the scope of the problem and to figure out what might be causing it. If the rise is linked to social media, for example, we’d expect increases in most industrialized countries, not just the U.S., and larger increases among girls given that they spend more time on social media and appear to be more affected by that time.
We already know that anxiety, low life satisfaction, emotional distress, poor mental health, and loneliness have increased among adolescents and/or young adults in many countries around the world. But critics have often argued that suicide rates are the exception to this trend – that adolescent suicide rates may have increased in the U.S., but not internationally. Studies using the Global Burden of Disease database have muddied the waters as that database contains only estimates of suicide rates, not actual rates.
In a previous post (also cross-posted on After Babel), I gathered recent studies on trends in the adolescent suicide rate in Europe, South Korea, and Japan, showing that the suicide rate was increasing for adolescent girls in most countries.
I was also able to find data on the adolescent suicide rate over time in Australia, Canada, and the UK (specifically, England and Wales). I’ve combined rates in 5-year blocks to make the overall trends more clear; these are lower-population countries with more variability in the suicide rate from year to year. I was not able to include New Zealand as they only provide suicide rate statistics broken down by sex for broad age groups (for example, 15 to 24), so we can’t see the data for adolescents alone. I’ll cover the U.S. in a future post.
A beach at Rottnest Island, off the coast of Western Australia
