"How the pandemic is intensifying depression and anxiety among teenagers" PBS NewsHour 3/9/2021
Excerpt
SUMMARY: This week marks a full year since the COVID-19 outbreak was declared a pandemic, and experts are increasingly concerned about the toll it is taking on the mental health of young people in the United States. With in-person classes closed for months for many students, there are also concerns the risks of youth suicide are being exacerbated. Stephanie Sy reports.
SUMMARY: When accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein died by suicide in a New York jail, some of his alleged victims reacted with outrage that he had robbed them of the chance to face him in court. But more than a dozen of Epstein’s accusers told their stories to a federal judge in Manhattan on Tuesday instead. Amna Nawaz talks to The Washington Post's Renae Merle about what the women shared.
SUMMARY: Jeffrey Epstein, the wealthy financier who was awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges, died by apparent suicide Saturday morning, a day after a federal court in New York unsealed a trove of documents related to his case. Julie Brown, the Miami Herald reporter who has been investigating the Epstein sex scandal for more than two years, joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss.
SUMMARY: Federal authorities are calling for an investigation after wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein was found dead of an apparent suicide in a New York jail on Saturday morning, just weeks after another reported attempt to take his own life. Epstein was in custody on sex-trafficking charges. Pervaiz Shallwani, senior editor at The Daily Beast, joins Hari Sreenivasan for more.
SUMMARY: The national suicide rate has hit its highest point since 1986, according to statistics released by the Centers for Disease Control. Among middle-aged Americans, the gender gap narrowed between men and women who took their own lives. For 10 to 14-year-old girls, the rate has tripled in the past 15 years. Hari Sreenivasan learns more from Katherine Hempstead of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): The government released new statistics about suicide in the U.S., and the results were sobering and stunning. The nation’s suicide rate is at its highest point since 1986. Nearly 43,000 people ended their own lives in 2014, which is the most recent year with full data.
Hari Sreenivasan has more on this story from our New York studios.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): The rise in rates were particularly alarming among some age groups. While the numbers are still smaller among children, the suicide rate was up sharply among 10-to-14-year-old girls, tripling in the past 15 years.
It also rose steeply among middle-aged Americans, 63 percent higher for middle-aged women, 43 percent higher for middle-aged men.
For some perspective on these trends and some of the potential reasons behind it, I’m joined by Katherine Hempstead, who studies this for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
For the record, the foundation is a funder of the NewsHour.
So, which of these sets of numbers, and we just went over a couple of them, but stood out to you when you saw this?
KATHERINE HEMPSTEAD, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation: Well, I think there has been concern about the middle-aged group for a while now.
And people have been noticing increased rates for both males and females. And with these latest results, we see really, really large increases for women in particular and a closing of that gender gap, as the female rates starts to be closer to the male rate.
HARI SREENIVASAN: That women try more, but men succeed more? Is that one of the…
(CROSSTALK)
KATHERINE HEMPSTEAD: Well, I think that’s something that is true.
There is much more of a nonfatal to fatal ratio for females. There are many more attempted self-harms that don’t result in fatal incidents. But now we see — with this new trend, we see the rates getting closer, and we also see a change in the method, so that we see this increasing adoption of suffocation or hanging as a suicide method by both males and females, and that is a highly lethal method.
SUMMARY: Greece traditionally has had a low suicide rate, but over five years of austerity, the country has seen an increase in the number of people taking their own lives. And if the crisis gets worse, the number of suicides and other preventable deaths from lack of medical care or drugs is likely to rise. Special correspondent Malcolm Brabant reports from Athens.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): Now another look at Greece, this time how its strained economy is affecting its people.
For the first four months of 2014, the budget for Greece’s 132 hospitals was $735 million. This year, that number dropped to $50 million, a precipitous decline that has placed predictable stress on the nation’s medical system. Now psychiatrists and other medical practitioners warn that deepening poverty will lead to an increase in suicides and preventable deaths.
NewsHour special correspondent Malcolm Brabant reports from Athens.
MALCOLM BRABANT (NewsHour): It’s a letter that no one should have to read. The suicide note left by 77-year-old pharmacist Dimitris Christoulas is now a treasured possession of his daughter, Emmy.
EMMY CHRISTOULAS, Daughter of Suicide Victim (through interpreter): “If one Greek was to take up a Kalashnikov, I would be the second. But since I am too old to react actively and physically, I find no other solution than that of a dignified exit before I begin searching through the garbage for my food. I believe that, one day, because the younger generation have no future, they will take up arms and hang the traitors of the nation, just as the Italians did in 1945.”
MALCOLM BRABANT: Christoulas shot himself beneath this pine tree in Athens’ Syntagma Square, where opponents urged Greek voters to reject the international austerity program in last weekend’s referendum.
One of the first on the scene was doorman Panos Kyriakopoulos
PANOS KYRIAKOPOULOS (through interpreter): Everyone who works around here was dreadfully upset, as well as those who were passing by. It was so unexpected, a man blowing out his brains in Syntagma Square. It was terrible, just terrible.
Craig Reichert found his son’s body on a winter morning, lying on the floor as if he were napping with his great-uncle’s pistol under his knee. The 911 dispatcher told him to administer CPR, but Mr. Reichert, who has had emergency training, told her it was too late. His son, Kameron, 17, was already cold to the touch.
Guns are like a grandmother’s diamonds in the Reichert family, heirlooms that carry memory and tradition. They are used on the occasional hunting trip, but most days they are stored, forgotten, under a bed. So when Kameron used one on himself, his parents were as shocked as they were heartbroken.
“I beat myself up quite a bit over not having a gun safe or something to put them in,” Mr. Reichert said. But he said even if he had had one, “There would have been two people in the house with the combination, him and me.”
The gun debate has focused on mass shootings and assault weapons since the schoolhouse massacre in Newtown, Conn., but far more Americans die by turning guns on themselves. Nearly 20,000 of the 30,000 deaths from guns in the United States in 2010 were suicides, according to the most recent figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The national suicide rate has climbed by 12 percent since 2003, and suicide is the third-leading cause of death for teenagers.
Guns are particularly lethal. Suicidal acts with guns are fatal in 85 percent of cases, while those with pills are fatal in just 2 percent of cases, according to the Harvard Injury Control Research Center.
The national map of suicide lights up in states with the highest gun ownership rates. Wyoming, Montana and Alaska, the states with the three highest suicide rates, are also the top gun-owning states, according to the Harvard center. The state-level data are too broad to tell whether the deaths were in homes with guns, but a series of individual-level studies since the early 1990s found a direct link. Most researchers say the weight of evidence from multiple studies is that guns in the home increase the risk of suicide.
“The literature suggests that having a gun in your home to protect your family is like bringing a time bomb into your house,” said Dr. Mark Rosenberg, an epidemiologist who helped establish the C.D.C.’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. “Instead of protecting you, it’s more likely to blow up.”
Still, some dispute the link, saying that it does not prove cause and effect, and that other factors, like alcoholism and drug abuse, may be driving the association. Gary Kleck, a professor of criminology at Florida State University in Tallahassee, contends that gun owners may have qualities that make them more susceptible to suicide. They may be more likely to see the world as a hostile place, or to blame themselves when things go wrong, a dark side of self-reliance.
Health officials in a number of states are trying to persuade families to keep guns away from troubled relatives or to lock the weapons up so teenagers cannot get them. Some of those same officials say the inflamed national gun control debate is actually making progress harder because the politics put gun owners on the defensive.
