This paper discusses trends in verdicts of suicide among adolescents in the UK over a forty-year period. The authors consider that there has not been a significant change in the way things are reported. The first graph gives the rates of suicide and accidental death for ages 10-14 and 14-19. Note the scale: in later adolescents the rate for young men is three times higher.
The good news is that the death rates have not increased. The bad news is that they have not decreased, and that social class matters. For both boys and girls, being in the most deprived quintile of society is a risk factor.
The authors comment on the changes over that period.
The availability and associated lethality of a range of suicide methods changed throughout our study period. Rates of suicide by gas poisoning rose from the early 1970s until 1992, before rapidly declining thereafter. This can be ascribed to the mandatory fitting of catalytic convertors in newly manufactured petrol motor vehicles from 1993 onwards.
More recently, reductions in the rate of suicide by solid and liquid poisoning may partially be explained by legislation to reduce the pack size of paracetamol and salicylates in 1998, the withdrawal of co-proxamol sales in 2005 and the transition in the prescribing of high-toxicity tricyclic to lower-toxicity selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants.
We found no clear evidence of a rise in suicides from 2003 onwards. This is reassuring given the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency activity to restrict prescribing of SSRIs to those aged below 18 years as a result of limited evidence of effectiveness and a concern that they may increase the risk of suicidal behaviour.
There was a substantial reduction in suicide deaths by jumping from the mid-1990s onwards for both males and females aged 15–19 years. This may have been because of the implementation of structural interventions to reduce the means of individuals jumping from
notable suicide hot spots.
One cannot tell, from this, how the interventions made in public mental health, listed above, have adjusted the rate of completion: other data sets have shown that interventions at suicide hot spots decrease death by jumping and total completed suicides.
Ideally, suicide in the young would be very rare. It is, unfortunately, not uncommon. However, it is always a tragedy.