Age Stratification: 2022 US Suicide Data
We have enough preliminary data to make calls on significant increases or decreases in 2022
I love playing with data, and creating compelling visualizations. For this post, I’m going to take the 2022 Preliminary CDC Data (we can use the 1999-2021 predictive ability of Jan-Nov to estimate the full year rate within a 5% margin of error) and take a look at suicide rates by age groups. For these age groups, I’m going to make practical sense. I have to give the general advice that 2022 contains preliminary data and may change (adjust upward slightly), but I have some pretty advanced algorithms at this point and can state pretty confidently that these numbers will closely reflect the final numbers.
Pediatric (0-17 years)
Group 1: Young children (<13 years of age) - this group is basically divided by secondary vs primary school, or generally children vs. adolescents. In 2022, the suicide rate of suicide decreased by 37.5%.
Compared to the pre-pandemic trend, we see a huge decrease in suicides for boys and girls in 2022.
Group 2: Adolescents (13-17 years of age) - this group represents high school students generally. In 2022, the suicide rate decreased by 7.6%, though when we separate boys from girls neither decrease is statistically significant.
Compared to the pre-pandemic trend, we see significantly lower rates throughout the pandemic for both boys and girls.
These two groups together (5-17 years of age, or “school-aged kids”) had a 10% decrease overall.
Adulthood (24 to 64 years)
Group 3: Young Adults (18 to 24 years of age) This captures university aged youth, transitional adults, and traditionally “life starting” ages. In 2022, the suicide rate decreased by 4%, carried entirely by a significant 9% drop in men, while women this age had virtually no change.
Compared to the pre-pandemic trend, men in 2022 showed a lower-than-expected rate of suicide while rates were as expected for women.
Group 4: Adults (25-40 years of age). There was no appreciable change in suicide rates in this age group.
Group 5: Older Adults (41 to 64 years of age). There was an overall 6% increase in the rate of suicide in 2022, with men having a 7% increase and women showing no significant change.
Compared to the pre-pandemic trend, despite the increase seen in men in 2022 both men and women are slightly below where we would expect.
Geriatric (65+ years)
Group 6: Silver Adults ;) (65 to 84 years of age) - This is the top bracket in my age standardized data set. Here we see a 7% increase in the suicide rate, with men reaching statistical significance while women did not (barely).
Note that by looking at the prepandemic trend, this appears to be returning to pre-pandemic trends, rather than higher than what we would expect.
85+ Years: Owing to the way I do age standardization in this data set, I can’t go past 85 years for visualization or calculation. However, I can look at the raw data and see that it’s likely that in the 85+ age group, there was a significant increase in male but not female suicide rates.
Putting it All Together
Overall, in the age standardized rates for the United States we see that rates are rising slightly for men and women, but continuing along the pre-pandemic trend.
