Canadian pediatric suicide rates have plummeted 20% since the pandemic
Canadian Mortality Data is finally out for 2021, confirming huge decreases in suicide for Canadian kids
We have waited a long time in Canada for mortality data to come from Statistics Canada. There have been some labour actions, as well as what I assume is an offsetting of prioritization to pandemic-specific or inflation-specific measures. Usually there is a lag of about 12-13 months to get the final data (unacceptably slow, Statscan!!) … this year it has been an agonizing 20-month wait. However, the data has now been published for 2021!
The metric I key in on first, and am presenting to you first, is the pediatric (<20 years of age) suicide rate for boys and girls. We have absolutely fantastic news: suicide rates for Canadian Youth have remained twenty percent lower through 2021.
Suicide Rates have decreased by 20% in Canadians under the age of 20 since the start of the pandemic.
Using Joinpoint software to analyse linear trends, we can calculate that approximately 111 fewer Canadian deaths under 20 by suicide have occurred in the 2 years since the pandemic started (95% confidence interval: 192 fewer to 29 fewer). Given that the previous two years (2018-2019) there were 537 suicides in this age range, this is a very significant decrease.
In the coming days I’ll break down various ages of adults, but lets do what we can do for kids:
Canadian Children Aged 5-14 years
In the 5-14 group, unfortunately it gets very noisy, especially if we divide by sex. However, we can broadly say that there were no excess of suicides in this young cohort, and the highest likelihood is that there was a decrease from the previous trend.
By calculation, we see 14 fewer suicides in this age group, but the 95% confidence interval spans between 37 fewer suicides and 9 more suicides, so it’s probably to think more in terms of “no increase” than “decrease.”
For young girls, we see that there is overall a net decrease though again it spans zero change.
For young boys, the 2020-2021 numbers are obviously more plainly straddling the zero change line.
Young girls still die by suicide more frequently than young boys do, a trend that has been true since about 2010.
Canadian Adolescents Aged 15-19 years
That of course means that adolescents 15-19 did much much better than expected, making up the bulk of the overall change we saw. Overall, this age had a whopping 21.5% decrease in suicide rates. Broken down by sex we see this affected Canadian girls and boys.
There has been an undeniable drop in pediatric suicide rates since the pandemic.
Putting it all together, it’s always difficult to know the why. In contrast, the US shows a very mild overall decrease in the pandemic and a straight net zero. Yet, the US is very different even if all we consider is gun ownership, health care access, and financial support during the pandemic.
All in all, this is obviously good news. Declining rates of suicide in kids are undeniably a good thing.