http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/22/health/suicide-rates-rise/Unfortunately, the last decade of change has not been, for most of us, a decade of increased hope.
In 2014, 13 people out of every 100,000 took their own lives, compared with 10.5 per 100,000 in 1999. The suicide rate increased every year from 1999 to 2014 among both women and men and in every age group except those 75 and older.
"The increase is broad-based," said Sally C. Curtin, a statistician at the National Center for Health Statistics and lead author of the new report, which was released Thursday.
Such an increase in suicides could also make prevention efforts more difficult. "If it were just one particular group, you could say 'that is where we need to focus,' " Curtin said.
The report is the first since 1999 to look at suicide rates among all age groups, she said.
The number of suicides increased among all racial groups except for black males, who saw an 8% decline in suicide rate from 10.5 to 9.7 per 100,000 between 1999 and 2014, respectively. The largest increases were among American Indians and Alaska Natives; in this group, the suicide rate climbed by 89% among women and 38% among men. Suicide rates among white women and white men increased by 60% and 28%, respectively.
it is difficult to know why suicide rates increased so much among American Indians and Alaska Natives
That's a silly thing to say. Globally, ethnic minorities as well as immigrants (whether legal or illegal) have higher suicide rates. The American analysts, since they don't seem to look outside America, are perhaps stumped or tongue-tied at why American Black Males have such a LOW suicide rate, since surely we agree that they are generally a disadvantaged minority. Should we presume that American black males are 8% less likely to commit suicide because of Obama hope factors?
Consider the facts and figures presented in this article:
http://mappingpoliceviolence.org/charts increase from 2013 to 2016 in killing of black people by American policealso,
It's NOT ABOUT CRIME; fewer than 1 in 3 black people killed by police in America were suspected of a previous crime.
More shockingly, the article claims there's NO correlation between level of crime*** in US cities, and propensity of cops to kill people.
*** (My bs meter fizzed on that last statement since it spoke of "crime" generally rather than VIOLENT crime specifically. Seems to me that cops presumably should not be killing people according to their criminality, but rather in order to prevent imminent lethal violence. So I'd like to see a chart comparing number of people killed in a city, to number of police killed on the beat. Does anyone know of such a statistic?)
My question is, could the increase in the number of black males being killed by police, and the disproportionately high number of black males being killed by police in the first, be accounted for at all by the disproportionately lower and falling rates of suicide among American black males?
Is it possible that after a layoff, a bad breakup, or other circumstances in which other people might be tempted to take their own lives, that a black male is more likely than say, a white man, an Asian man, or a Native American man or woman, to advance on a cop with his hands held high, holding a knife, shouting shoot me you mother-smoocher?
I think society has seriously failed black men by giving them such a tempting, glorious, and facile means of self-destruction. They don't even have to pull their own trigger. What could tempt more stupid young men to self-destruction than tell them they can be remembered as martyrs if they kill themselves by a socially approved kamikaze ritual?
