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Terrifying and baffling. Terrifying, of course, because the pandemic and the resulting school closures have done enormous psychological damage to children. Confusing because I can’t see why the difference between the sexes would be as dramatic as it is.
Why do months of solitude cause girls to become so desperate to self-harm at a much higher rate than boys?
Is there an obvious explanation or will we have to resort to some half-baked gender stereotypes like “girls are more sensitive” or “girls socialize more”?
Perhaps this is a stereotype for a reason.
The new study, which relied on data from the National Syndromic Surveillance Program, showed that teenage girls aged 12 to 17 visited emergency rooms with suspected suicide attempts 50.6 percent more in the winter of 2021 than in the corresponding period in 2019.
The rate of suspected suicide attempts among adolescents and adults of both sexes aged 18-25 years has remained stable, compared to the corresponding period in 2019.
“The results of this study indicate more severe distress among young women than has been identified in previous reports during the pandemic, reinforcing the need for increased attention and prevention to this population,” the report said.
So not only were teens more likely to attempt suicide and end up seeking emergency care than they were in the pre-pandemic period, even the next group of older females — young women ages 18 to 25 — were no more likely. The only group of American youth that saw a huge rise were middle and high school girls.
My first thought in treatment was that perhaps during normal times teenage boys are more likely to attempt suicide than teenage girls. In this case, months of isolation during the pandemic may have forced some girls to break up who would otherwise be fine, resulting in a higher rate of gender suicide attempts towards boys. However, there are two problems. First: If boys are more likely to attempt suicide during normal times, wouldn’t we expect to see a sharp rise in their rate during the pandemic as well?
Second: It’s not actually true that boys ended up in the emergency room quite often for suicide attempts before COVID. The opposite is true.
The top graph is for girls, the bottom graph is for boys. You see, teenage girls were coming down to the emergency room for suicide-related reasons two to three times higher than boys were in early 2019. This, on the one hand, helps explain the huge rise between last year and this year: Girls may be more likely to try Boys commit suicide for any reason and therefore react more severely to isolation. But this is still not responsible for the stable rate among boys. Even if boys are less likely to land in the emergency room than attempt suicide, why haven’t they attempted suicide more than once last year?
Could it be that the boys’ daily routines weren’t disrupted as much as the girls were during quarantine because they involve more individual activity? For example, if we assume that boys tend to play video games during their leisure time more than girls, then perhaps the lives of boys have not changed much from COVID. They were still playing online with friends and getting some socializing that way.
A Twitter friend suggested there may have been fewer boys who went down to the ER to commit suicide in the past year due to having more accidental drug overdoses over the same period. That is, if it is true that boys are more likely to use drugs than girls (right?), then some boys who are depressed enough to take a lot of drugs and who *tried* eventually commit suicide, might end up in the emergency room for overdose instead – Or worse, they end up dying before they can kill themselves. In other words, just because there are fewer boys who need hospital treatment for suicide attempts doesn’t mean there are fewer boys who have resorted to acts of desperation amid the gloom of the pandemic.
But there is a problem with this theory, too. If there is gender disparity in overdose, why have rates of emergency room visits for suicide attempts been so stable among men and women aged 18-25? We should see the same kind of gender divide there, right?
I wonder if the answer here lies in the fact that we’re not talking about suicide attempts among teens in general, but about suicide attempts that ended with a trip to the emergency room. Could it be that boys are using more lethal means to attempt suicide (pistols, let’s say) while girls are using less lethal means (pills)? If so, an equal amount of suicide attempts between the sexes does not mean an equal amount of ER visits. Many boys end up dying at the scene and will not be taken to the hospital while many girls still have a chance of surviving an intentional overdose if they are taken to the emergency room and treated quickly. Does this explain the discrepancy? If so, uh, how does he explain the reason for the increase in the number of girls this year, when it did not happen for boys? Were the boys reliably using lethal measures in their suicide attempts?
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Picture Credit!