Suicide Down 8.4% Among Teens and Young Adults

Plus: How would Jesus vote?, appeals court strikes gun ban for marijuana users, and more…

ELIZABETH NOLAN BROWN

The drop in teen and young adult suicides is a bright spot among an overall bleak portrait of U.S. suicide rates in 2022.

Overall, 49,449 Americans are known to have killed themselves last year—the highest number of U.S. suicides on record and an increase of 2.6 percent over 2021. The CDC “has not yet calculated a suicide rate for the year, but available data suggests suicides are more common in the U.S. than at any time since the dawn of World War II,” reports the Associated Press.

Among adults ages 25 through 44, suicides were up by 0.7 percent.

The data don’t speak well of overall American mental health in the early 2020s. But they strike a blow against some common concerns about the roots of mental health declines.

For instance, the data don’t support the idea that suicides are being driven by the internet and social media. The age groups most likely to have experienced an increase in suicides are those least likely to be heavy users of social media platforms.

The data also suggest some much-needed good news about suicidality among young people. Data released last year showed suicides among 15-to-19-year-olds jumped from 8.4 per 100,000 during 2012–2014 to 10.8 per 100,000 in 2018–2020. And a CDC report released earlier this year showed a steep increase in the number of teen girls who said they had thought about suicide. Last year’s number of teen and young-adult suicides is still bleak, with 6,529 10-to-24-year-olds killing themselves. But this is down from 7,126 suicides in this age group in 2021.

Men (of all ages) were much more likely to commit suicide than their female counterparts in 2022. Some 39,255 American men and 10,194 American women committed suicide.

FREE MINDS

— Samuel Perry (@profsamperry) August 10, 2023

What Perry shared suggests “the more extreme you are politically, the more extreme your Jesus is,” as he pointed out. “A strong plurality of ‘very conservative’ Christians say Jesus is as far right as possible. Similarly, a strong plurality of ‘very liberal’ Christians think Jesus is extreme left.” Meanwhile, self-described “moderate Christians” were more likely to place Jesus as a political moderate than at either extreme.

— Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons (@GuthrieGF) August 10, 2023

FREE MARKETS

“The opinion overturns the conviction of a Mississippi man, Patrick D. Daniels of Gulfport, who had two guns found in his car during a traffic stop last year and acknowledged using marijuana regularly but wasn’t accused of driving under the influence,” notes the A.P.

The ruling raises questions about the future of the law, which also had a central role in the proposed plea deal for Hunter Biden, the president’s son.

“As the first federal court appeals ruling on this provision, [the decision will] be persuasive and influential to other circuits and other district courts who are reviewing these kind of challenges,” Pepperdine University law professor Jake Charles told the A.P.

But the decision is not binding outside of the 5th Circuit (which includes Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas). Hunter Biden’s case was filed in Delaware.

“Federal courts are wisely deciding time and again that the simple use of cannabis should not preclude someone from the legal protections offered to all Americans by the US Constitution,” said NORML Political Director Morgan Fox in a statement. “Unfortunately, these rulings are not universally applicable or binding. Either the Supreme Court or Congress need to make this the law of the land before any more responsible cannabis consumers are threatened with lengthy prison terms simply for exercising their constitutional rights.”

QUICK HITS

• Sigh: Americans overwhelmingly favor more government regulation of artificial intelligence (A.I.), according to polling from the Artificial Intelligence Policy Institute. Fifty-six percent of poll respondents support a federal agency regulating A.I. while just 14 percent were opposed. And 82 percent said they don’t trust tech companies to self-regulate.

• Behold U.K. hate speech laws in action:

this statement refers to a half-dozen officers taking an autistic teen into custody for saying one officer looked like a lesbian, like her grandma

scope creep is eternal https://t.co/b7edsvRrkK

— TracingWoodgrains (@tracewoodgrains) August 10, 2023

• A federal court has ruled against the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in its fight with the Cigar Association of America. The decision strikes down an FDA plan to regulate premium cigars under the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, which would have given the agency the same control over premium cigars as it has over cigarettes. “This underscores what we have been saying for years: premium cigars are different and should be treated as such,” Scott Pearce, executive director of the Premium Cigar Association, told Cigar Aficionado.

Since starting at Reason in 2014, Brown has won multiple awards for her writing on the U.S. government’s war on sex. Brown’s writing has also appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Daily Beast, Buzzfeed, Playboy, Fox News, Politico, The Week, and numerous other publications. You can follow her on Twitter @ENBrown.

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