CDC Reports 51% Increase in Suicide Attempts Among Teenage Girls

The discussion section at the bottom is particularly interesting, because it summarizes several hypotheses that might explain the cause of this increase.

Most interesting to me is the premise that it's possible that increased exposure to their children might be increasing parents' awareness of their children's behavior. Which makes it more interesting to me that more girls are brought to the hospital for suspected suicide attempts than boys.

From my experience working through that, but also just out in the world I’ve found that young men frequently take up extremely risky behaviors with a disregard for their safety to cope with similar internal turmoil. Obviously, some take the direct route. I’ve lost a couple friends to immeasurable despair.

In the USA at least the mental health system is so fucking screwed. I’m not saying young women have it better, but the antiquated biases are very much present in clinicians, researchers, and really everyone else. Women are emotional, protect them... but also a huge amount of medical pros don’t believe a woman can be passing autistic. Men/boys just need to “walk it off”. Largely even seeking help for mental distress is seen as something weak people do. It’s abysmal. If a study doesn’t address those very real biases in our culture, I don’t know if you can draw a useful conclusion.

Having talked to my nieces and nephews and some of their friends (aged 10-22ish, probably a sample set of 15 kids that I know) something that I know even from before the pandemic is that they are acutely aware of how fucked they are and that the world as it’s set up is just fucking them harder and seems pathologically geared to continue to do so. They don’t even have the words to articulate it how I have here, they internalize it and try to grok it from the inside out. They put a smile on and do their best to seem normal. We need to listen to the kids and their despair. It’s ridiculous to say that it’s just that they are upset about having to spend time with someone they don’t like. We are boiling and this is the first of many plagues. The boomers borrowed from the future and are willing to ride it till the wheels fall off.... The kids have the internet and very much know what the world has set up for them.

[1] https://time.com/5590344/youth-suicide-rates/

Edit: The Time article links to original JAMA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_differences_in_suicide

> Provisional mortality data found an overall decrease in the age-adjusted suicide rate from quarter 3 (July–September) of 2019 to quarter 3 of 2020. The suicide rate among young persons aged 15–24 years during this same period saw no significant change (9).

So in other words: what changed was the rate of emergency department admissions, not actual suicides. I would wonder if lockdowns meant that more suicide attempts were made near family, who would then notice the attempt and take the person to the ED.

How one could objectively measure whether girls are, in fact, more impacted by social stress, is not something I know the answer to.

1. because it’s only due to the masks and endless testing the Covid death count is so low

2. Without the masks and endless testing, young people would infect many many older people, creating even more deaths

This isn’t a conspiracy. Doctors do want the least number of deaths in the community.

So instead of 10 million cancer deaths per year, suddenly we see zero. But also 10 extra choking deaths.

"The Anti-Cancer Pill caused 10 people to choke to death this year. In contrast, 0 people died of cancer. 10 is much bigger than 0! Why hasn't this pill been banned immediately?"

Even if we did prioritize the hundred over the thousands, I see ending lockdowns, but what's your justification for ending mask policies and testing?

Even if there is a causal relationship, there's not enough evidence to conclude that it's a direct causal relationship between lockdown and suicide, let alone between masks/testing and suicide (what?).

For instance, I'd bet that at least a few of the excess deaths are from harmful parents - whether physically abusive, intolerant of something about their kid's identity, etc. In my social circles I know a whole lot of people who have a strained if not nonexistent relationship with their parents and for whom leaving home for college quite literally saved their life. I can easily see a loss of hope for students in their final years of high school, and the study also includes 18-25-year-olds - which includes students who had already moved to dorms and were then sent home.

These kids probably could have survived lockdown just fine, were they living on their own or in a supportive household. They just didn't survive their parents. The causal relationship is that we instituted lockdown without any regard for harmful family situations.

It seems both possible and ethical to study statements made by people who died by suicide (suicide notes, public social media posts, statements to friends, etc.), and I think that would be a lot more scientifically useful for the cause of preventing suicide than assuming that the reason was that they didn't like lockdown per se.

folks over 65 and 40% BMI got their go in life. prioritizing around the make makes more sense to me.

thankfully the lockdowns are no stomach anymore in most of the states. a visit to an airport and any city not in california or ny and you can see and feel the difference in an instant.

Regarding the lockdown comment, again I’ll write that things don’t exist in a vacuum- optimizing policy over a demographic with 23 deaths, at the expense of demographics with hundreds of thousands of deaths, is probably not a trade many politicians/public health officials/etc think is good.

But who knows, maybe guy-in-the-chat knows better. Should probably brush up on his basic stats first, though!.

Meanwhile, COVID affects other populations at a much greater degree. So, no statistical change in harm to children, and a much greater benefit for adults. That's why the restrictions make sense.

> Why havn't all restrictions across the land (including masks and endless testing) ceased immediately?

"across the land"? What kind of medieval clown talk is that lol

Our society hadn't really dealt with a pandemic of this size since 1919 (although that one was far bigger), and hadn't dealt with a pandemic of any significant size since 1968, so clearly we did some things wrong. It's kind of like a military which has not fought a war in decades; you can expect them to not be very good at strategy for the first year.

By the way, masks and "endless testing" do not cause anywhere remotely as much stress as lockdowns, I don't believe.

So, yeah, the restrictions haven't been immediately lifted because that would be entirely unjustified.