Change seen in teen suicide methods

By Nora Achrati
Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - Before 1997, the overwhelming majority of young people who
committed suicide used guns. But that's changing.

In recent years, teenagers who choose to kill themselves - young teens
especially - turned more often to hanging or other types of suffocation than to
shooting, according to a report Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, the Atlanta-based federal health protection agency.

Finding out why teens are changing their methods is key to developing better
suicide-prevention programs, researchers say.

The findings are discussed in the latest Morbidity and Mortality Weekly
Report, a summary of new health research published by the CDC.

Suicide is the third leading killer of young people ages 10 to 19, with about
2,000 deaths in the United States each year. It ranks 11th in causes of death
nationwide. The new report, which looked at trends in teen suicides from 1992
to 2001, shows the suicide rate among young people has fallen in the past
decade. But the methods used by teens have changed dramatically.

In young teens and preteens - those ages 10 to 14 - the change is especially
striking: From 1992 to 2001, the number of suicides by suffocation rose 70
percent, while the number of firearm deaths dropped by nearly half. Suicide by
suffocation now outnumbers suicide by firearm nearly 2 to 1.

The majority of teens ages 15 to 19 who commit suicide still turn to guns,
the report said, though the number of those who use guns has been dropping.
Meanwhile, the number of older teens who turn to suffocation is rising.

That teenagers who commit suicide are shying away from firearms may reflect
trends in gun ownership and attitudes. Studies at the University of Chicago
show a decrease in handgun ownership in the1990s, and in CDC surveys, fewer
children say they've handled guns.

"I think what you're seeing is sort of gradual social shift against
firearms," said Dr. David Shaffer, the chief psychiatrist at Columbia University's
division of child and adolescent psychiatry and developer of a program to screen
for depression in teenagers.

For Shaffer and others who study suicide prevention, the report indicates
that identifying a means of suicide isn't enough to stop one.

Shaffer cites studies in Australia that showed a steep decline in
gun-inflicted suicides after strict gun-control measures were passed in the early 1990s.
That drop was matched by a near-simultaneous increase in hangings.

"The history has always been that trying to control suicide by changing
access to methods doesn't work for very long," Shaffer said. "What we should be
looking at is proper diagnosis and treatment, and increasing the public's
awareness of what mental illness in kids look like."

For Mark Chaffee of San Diego, Calif., the essential message is that suicide
prevention takes many tacks. In 1998, Chaffee lost his 16-year-old son to a
self-inflicted gunshot wound. He says the means of death didn't mattered.

"It's just the loss," he said. "It's unspeakable. It is the nightmare that
you would not wish on your worst enemy. ... It doesn't matter how it happens."

Shaffer now leads the California chapter of the Suicide Prevention Action
Network, or SPAN, which works to educate the public on suicide risks,
particularly in teens.

"It's preventable," he said. "It's not inevitable. It's not acceptable."

The CDC report found other patterns in teen suicide.

-An association between suicide attempts and violent behavior: More than 60
percent of high school students who said they attempted suicide in the past
year also said they'd been involved in a physical fight, although most kids
involved in fights in school don't report having tried to commit suicide.

-A link between school shootings and suicide: 22 percent of students who
carried out shootings at school between 1994 and 1999 committed suicide afterward,
researchers found. The CDC recommends that violence prevention efforts in
schools also target suicidal behavior.

-Researchers found suicide was also the third leading cause of death among
young Latinos in the United States, the fastest-growing segment of the
population. Young men made up the vast majority of suicides.