Friday, November 4, 2016

Suicide Kills More Middle School Students Than Car Crashes

 I think it is important to be realistic about all this. When I grew up in the 1950s young people were dying of all sorts of things: falling off of roofs, getting hit by cars, flying through the air through windshields in car accidents, getting polio, and getting poisoned by unregulated food products etc.

However, if you look at families back 500 years even in the 1950s families of 10 children or more were not unusual because many of them were expected to die of illness or accident before 21. So, I think it is unrealistic even if a child physically survives until 12 that all of them are going to make it to 21 or 30. If you study humanity that never happened. Few survive without a lot of wounds both internally and externally to 30 and beyond. In fact, the statistic is "IF you live until 30 you can mostly expect now to live until 90."

The reason this is said is many die from all sorts of causes between 12 and 30. My cousin said to me about raising his kids. "You just have to keep them alive from about 18 to 25. Then sometimes they can take care of themselves."

This is closer to reality than many like to think. (All his kids have at least a bachelor's degree or more and all are successful in life and married with kids).
 begin quote from:
The suicide rate among U.S. middle school students doubled from 2007 to 2014, surpassing for the first time the incidence of youngsters aged 10 to 14 who died in car crashes, federal researchers found. The steady seven …

Suicide Kills More Middle School Students Than Car Crashes

The suicide rate among U.S. middle school students doubled from 2007 to 2014, surpassing for the first time the incidence of youngsters aged 10 to 14 who died in car crashes, federal researchers found.
The steady seven-year rise in middle school suicides, from an annual rate of 0.9 to 2.1 per 100,000, came as traffic deaths among the same age group declined to 1.9 per 100,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
The motor vehicle mortality rate reported for 2014, the latest year for which such data was available, showed a 60 percent decline from 1999, when the government began tracking such figures.
In aggregate numbers, 425 young people 10 to 14 years of age took their own lives in 2014, compared with 384 who perished in automobile accidents that year, according to the CDC.
Related: More Kids Sick, Dying From Opioid Overdoses
Those figures contrasted sharply with figures from 1999, when the rate of middle school students killed in car crashes was four times higher than the rate among those who died from suicide that year.
"Any rise (in youth suicides) should be of concern, there's no doubt," Mark Kaplan, a professor of social welfare at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in a phone interview, commenting on the findings.
"In time we might uncover some reasons, but a cautionary note [is] not to rush to any conclusions from this," Kaplan said.
Related: Suicide Rates Soar in U.S.
The underlying causes of suicide are highly complex, making it difficult to explain the trends documented by the CDC, he added.
The leading overall cause of death for Americans 10 to 14 years of age remains accidents of all kinds, including car crashes, accounting for 750 fatalities in that age group in 2014, according to the CDC.
Mortality rates from traffic collisions among all age groups have decreased over several decades in the United States, which observers attribute in part to improved safety features in ca

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