Posted: 6/10/2004 1:09:36 PM EDT
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Suicidal Youths Turn to Hanging Instead of Guns A new report finds that suicidal young people are less likely to use firearms to take their own lives, but the survey finds little comfort in the trend because they are turning to more readily available methods. In the last decade, suffocation -- notably hanging -- has overtaken firearms as the most common way for adolescents to kill themselves, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports. The greatest change was among youngsters between 10 and 14 years old, where suicide by suffocation occurred twice as frequently as suicide by a self-inflicted gunshot. Firearms were the most common method before 1997, the report found Among those 15 to 19 years of age, however, suffocation suicides also increased, but firearms remained the method of choice in 2001. In other findings, the CDC reported that young people who attempted suicide were four times as likely to have been involved in a fistfight in the previous year. However, a third survey found that those who committed a school-related suicide between 1994 and 1999 had no history of fighting or otherwise getting into trouble with the police. The report in the CDC publication Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report had some good news: Overall, the suicide rate among people 10 to 19 years of age dropped from 6.2 per 100,000 people in 1992 to 4.6 per 100,000 in 2001. |