New research reveals significant disparities in the rates at which people with suicidal ideation visited emergency departments in the United States in recent years, with Black people and adolescent females among the most affected.
According to a report released on Thursday by the National Center for Health Statistics of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the average annual rate of emergency department visits for patients who had been contemplating, planning, or thinking about suicide was 40 per 10,000 people from 2016 to 2020.
As per US News, Black persons had the highest average annual visit rate involving suicidal ideation among the racial and ethnic groups studied, at 68 per 10,000 individuals. This was in comparison to 42 visits per 10,000 for whites and 25 visits per 10,000 for Hispanics or Latinos.
According to the study, the rate for other non-Hispanic racial categories was 19 visits per 10,000 individuals. The report’s findings are based on a sample of 860 emergency department visits between 2016 and 2020, representing an annual average of approximately 1.3 million visits, as well as population estimates.
The average annual rate of emergency department visits for suicidal ideation among adolescents aged 14 to 18 was 91 per 10,000 individuals. When examined by age and gender, girls in this age range had the highest rate of visits, at 128 per 10,000 individuals per year. Then, rates decreased among older female age categories.
Meanwhile, males 14 to 18 years old visited the ED with suicidal ideation at a rate of 55 per 10,000 on average per year. Men in this age range visit the emergency room at a rate of 97 per 10,000 persons per year.
The report follows a previous CDC study that found emergency department visits for suspected suicide attempts increased by more than 50 percent between late February and late March of 2021 among females aged 12 to 17 compared to the same period in 2019. Approximately 4% more visits increased among males of the same age.
Males had a higher average annual rate of visits involving suicidal ideation, 46 per 10,000 people per year, compared to the female rate of 34 per 10,000 people per year, according to the new study. From 2001 to 2021, the suicide rate for men was approximately three to four times higher than the suicide rate for women, according to a separate report released by the CDC on Thursday.
While the suicide rate was lowest among females 10 to 14 years old in 2021 at 2.3 deaths per 100,000, this represented a more than 280 percent increase from the rate of 0.6 deaths per 100,000 in 2001. Similarly, the death rate for girls and women aged 15 to 24 increased by 110% over the past two decades, from 2.9 per 100,000 to 6.1.
After two consecutive years of decline, the U.S. suicide rate increased by 4.4% from 2020 to 2021, from 13.5 fatalities per 100,000 people to 14.1. The rate in 2021 increased by more than 30 percent from the 2001 rate of 10.7 per 100,000.
