9781422273920

After many years of gradually declining suicide rates, suicides among Americans have been increasing in recent years. In what has been justifiably called a public health crisis, we now lose more than 100 Americans to suicide every single day—nearly 50,000 Americans per year. In 2017, suicide was the second-leading cause of death among Americans between the ages of 10 and 34. The only greater cause of death was unintentional injury, such as car accidents and accidental poisonings. A report published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) found that in 2017, suicide rates among young people increased by 47 percent as compared to the year 2000. There are probably a variety of reasons for this, but the JAMA study highlighted the opioid crisis as a contributing factor. Because a large number of completed suicide attempts involve guns, other researchers have also pointed to rising rates of gun ownership as another significant factor. There is a lot of media coverage of gun violence in the United States, but people are sometimes surprised to learn that suicides outnumber homicides by two to one. When researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health compared data on gun

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