HOW THE UNDYING HOLIDAY-SUICIDE MYTH IS FALSE, SUICIDE PREVENTION IS 24 HOURS #988 (1056 hits)
For Immediate Release From NAMI-Minnesota!
The holiday-suicide myth, the false claim that the suicide rate rises during the year-end holiday season, persisted in some news coverage through the 2021-22 holidays, according to U.S. media data collected and analyzed by the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC).
In fact, although the U.S. suicide rate increased in 2021 after two years of declines, the average daily suicide rate during the holiday months remained among the lower rates of the year.
APPC’s media analysis, which is based on newspaper stories published over the 2021-22 holiday season, found that a little more than half of the stories that directly discussed the holidays and the suicide rate supported the false myth, while the remainder debunked it.
For over two decades, the Annenberg Public Policy Center has sought to correct the popular misconception linking the holidays with suicide by analyzing newspaper stories to see whether they perpetuated or debunked the holiday-suicide myth. Over the 2021-22 holiday season, only 25 stories made the connection, with 14 of those perpetuating the myth (56%) and 11 debunking it (44%) – among the lowest total counts since APPC has tracked this. (See Figs. 1 and 2.)
The U.S. suicide rate rises again Provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show that the number of suicides increased in 2021, following declines in 2019 and 2020. However, the national age-adjusted suicide rate in 2021 was no higher than the recent peak in 2018 (14.0 per 100,000 population in 2021 vs. 14.2 in 2018).
During 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic was declared, followed by lockdowns in parts of the United States. According to provisional data released by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics in September 2022, the number of suicides in 2021 was 4% higher than in 2020.
The CDC noted that the monthly number of suicides was lower in 2021 than in 2020 in January, February, and July, and higher in all of the other months.
In 2021, the average number of U.S. suicide deaths per day in January and December put those two months among the lowest of the 12 months – 10th and 12th, respectively. The suicide rate in November in 2021 made it 7th among the 12 months. The month with the highest rate of suicides in 2021 was August. (See Fig. 3 and Table 1.)
