In the '80s and '90s, America's suicide trend was headed in the right direction: down.
"It had been decreasing almost steadily since 1986, and then what happened is there was a turnaround," says Sally Curtin, a statistician with the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The suicide rate has risen by a quarter, to 13 per 100,000 people in 2014 from 10.5 in 1999, according to an analysis by Curtin and her colleagues that was released Friday.
She says it's heartbreaking to work with these data. While other causes of death are on the decline, suicide just keeps climbing — and it's doing so for every age group under 75.
"I've been losing sleep over this, quite honestly," says Curtin. "You can't just say it's confined to one age group or another for males and females. Truly at all ages people are at risk for this, and our youngest have some of the highest percent increases."
There is one age group that really stands out — girls between the ages of 10 and 14. Though they make up a very small portion of the total suicides, the rate in that group jumped the most — it experienced the largest percent increase, tripling over 15 years from 0.5 to 1.7 per 100,000 people.
[For more of this story, written by Rae Ellen Bichell, go to http://www.npr.org/sections/he...ong-adolescent-girls]
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