Suicide rates for middle-aged people are edging up — particularly for white men without college degrees — and a combination of poor health and a poor economy may be driving it, U.S. researchers said on Monday.
Middle-aged people usually have a relatively low risk for suicide as they seek to support their families, but baby boomers are bucking this trend, sociologists Julie Phillips of Rutgers University in New Jersey and Ellen Idler of Emory University in Atlanta found.
"If these trends continue, they are cause for concern," Phillips and Idler wrote in the journal Public Health Reports.
"Male baby boomers have yet to reach old age, the period of the male life course at highest risk for suicide; if they continue to set historically high suicide rates as they did in adolescence and now in middle age, their rates in old age could be very high indeed."
The researchers used suicide data from the National Center for Health Statistics and analyzed it by age group, marital status, education, and other factors. The period they studied preceded the most recent economic crisis.
"Following a period of stability or decline, suicide rates have climbed since 1988 for males aged 40-49 years, and since 1999 for females aged 40-59 years and males aged 50-59 years," they wrote.
In 1979 the suicide rate for men aged 40 to 49 was 21.8 per 100,000. It rose to as high as 24 per 100,000 in 1996 and to 25 by 2005. For men 50 to 59 it was 23.9 in 1979, fell to 20.4 per 100,000 in 1999, and rose again to nearly 23.8 in 2005.
© 2010 Reuters. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content, including by caching, framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters.
