Rhitu Chatterjee
14 Jun 2018
The biggest change was seen among women in late middle age. "For females between the ages of 45 and 64, the suicide rate increased by 60 percent," she says. "That's a pretty large increase in a relatively short period of time."
The number of people dying by suicide in the United States has risen by about 30 percent in the past two decades. And while the majority of suicide-related deaths today are among boys and men, a study published Thursday by the National Center for Health Statistics finds that the number of girls and women taking their own lives is rising.
"Typically there's between three and four times as many suicides among males as among females," says Dr. Holly Hedegaard, a medical epidemiologist at the NCHS and the main author of the new study. In 2016, about 21 boys or men out of 100,000 took their own lives. On the other hand, just six girls or women out of 100,000 died by suicide that year.