… but a sensible enough article in the Huffington Post.
… The cause of suicide is not Ivy League pressure or the social and academic expectations that distinguish one school from another. Suicide is the third leading cause of death among young people between 15 and 24 years of age: the college years simply fall within this period.
The brain changes that occur in adolescence–specifically the pruning of gray matter that makes our brains more efficient and capable of complex, intellectual operations–are often responsible for adolescent angst as well as the onset of serious psychiatric disorders. The first peak of depression typically occurs around age 13-14; schizophrenia first appears around 18-19; and adult-onset bipolar disorder, or manic depression, tends to begin suddenly around 19-20.
… Don’t think … that the Arizona sunshine, or the prestige of Harvard, or the Florida beaches will cure your child’s psychiatric disorder…
March 30th, 2010 at 10:22AM
Blaming suicide on “brain changes” is a pretty awful translation of what’s known about suicide rates. Suicide rates are high for adolescents and young adults when compared with other causes of death in the same age range, but that’s less because suicide’s a horribly high risk for adolescence and more because other causes of death are rare in our industrialized society.
Mortality in general follows a U-shaped curve. It drops from birth to about age 5, stays low until the mid-teens, and then slowly rises for a few decades until it climbs more rapidly. Suicide appears prominent in the ages of generally low mortality, but suicide rates are much higher at older ages. The reason why suicides among those in their 60s aren’t discussed much is because heart disease, cancer, strokes, and other causes of death are much larger risks than suicide for those in their 60s, and those risks are much lower for 20-year-olds.
That doesn’t mean that we should ignore depression and other mental illnesses among adolescence and early adults, but it does mean that we should admit that disturbing and relatively rare events are still relatively rare.
March 30th, 2010 at 2:16PM
I agree that this is a crappy headline and not just because I went to Cornell!