Suicide Trends: U.S. Trends by for Women by Age Through 2022
Trend is bad for adult women, but age structure differs a lot from male
To put this in context, remember that this is the high-level trend for suicide rates in the U.S. by sex for 1999-2022:
The rate for males is about 4 times that of females, on an age-adjusted basis.
That said, both for males and females, the suicide rate has been increasing since 1999, though there had been a drop during the pandemic in 2020… and then an increase again.
U.S. Female Suicide Rates, 1968-2022, by Age Group
Here is a graph of all the age groups together
Yes, I know it’s busy. I’ll be breaking it up into subgroups as I did with the men:
Young women (under 45)
Middle-aged women (45 - 64)
Senior women (65+)
But before that, I want to point out the vertical scale here, and the difference with the men’s trends.
The highest point you can see here is early on, for the age 45-54 data series. It maxes out under 14 per 100,000 per year in rate.
This is under the minimum for the men’s rate for all age groups over the age of 25.
The maximum rate recorded among the men’s groups was about 70, for the age 85+ group, around 1990.
This is just to provide an order-of-magnitude comparison.
Young Women
Good news and bad news going on here.
At least the recent rates for the age 35-44 year-olds aren’t as high as the ones seen in the late 1960s/early 1970s.
However, as with the men, we’re seeing a general increase in rates since 2000.
What’s really concerning is the increase for children and adolescents. Recent rates for them have exceeded rates seen in the 1970s.
Middle-aged Women
This trend does show the increase from 2000 to 2019 seen in all the other sex/age groups in general… but a weird trend during the pandemic.
That’s an almost 20% drop in suicide rates in 2020 — huh? That’s a very large drop.
I really doubt this is coming from “substitution" effects, in that these women were dying of COVID instead of dying from suicide.
I have heard people positing that some people found purpose in the initial stages of the pandemic, in that they had something to do or something to fight. Maybe this was something particularly important for women in this age range.
For the record, I’m in this age range (I’m 49 right now.)
Senior Women
This is where we see a big difference in age structure of suicide death rates for males and females. For males, the highest rates come from the oldest age groups. For females, the highest rates come from middle age.
Age profiles male v. female, key years
So let’s do some comparisons, graphed a different way.
We’ve been looking at the female rates, so let’s graph those first:
For this graph, we have clustered columns, each cluster for a different selected year — and the colors are the same as the age groups as before.
Note that the middle-aged groups are the ones with the highest rate for any particular year.
Now here are the profiles for males:
Ugh.
Yeah, the rates for old men are much higher. But my main point here is the difference in the age profile for males vs. females.
It’s not a competition, it’s a comparison
The main point for giving you this information is just for you to be aware.
I am not trying to blame anybody in particular, or say it’s worse or better for men or women.
Many people just guess about what the trends are when they talk about suicide death rates, and I’m here to just let you know what it happens to be:
Suicide death rates have been getting worse for pretty much all adult demographic groups, since 2000, no matter age, sex, or race/ethnicity
The highest rates are for old men
Among women, the highest rates are in middle age
Among races/ethnicity, the current highest rates are among Native Americans/Native Alaskans.
I may do one more post involving geography.
Current posts on suicide trends:
Suicide Trends: U.S. Trends by Sex and Race/Ethnicity through 2022
Suicide Trends: U.S. Trends by for Women by Age Through 2022 [this one]