PRESS RELEASE
Americans Are Killing Themselves at Increasing Rates, New Data Show
April 22, 2016 (EIRNS)—Yet another study has been published on the demographic implosion which the United States has undergone since the 1999 elimination of Franklin Roosevelt’s Hamiltonian Glass-Steagall Act, and the related economic and political policy shifts which followed under the Bush and Obama administrations.
National Center of Health Statistics Data Brief No. 241, posted today on the Centers for Disease Control website, is short—and stark:
"After a period of nearly consistent decline in suicide rates in the United States from 1986 through 1999, suicide rates have increased almost steadily from 1999 through 2014. While suicide among adolescents and young adults is increasing, and among the leading causes of death for those demographic groups, suicide among middle-aged adults is also rising."
Rates have risen so sharply since the last federal report in 2013, that researchers issued this report to call attention to the problem, the New York Times reported. As one of the authors of the study, CDC statistician Sally Curtin, pointed out in an interview with NPR today, "the deaths are but the tip of the iceberg," since there are always many more suicide attempts than those in which people succeed in killing themselves.
The overall suicide rate in the United States increased 24% over that period (from 10.5 suicides per 100,000 people in 1999, to 13 per 100,00 in 2014), "with the pace of increase greater after 2006," to an average annual percent increase of about 2% per year. The increase in the suicide rate occurred in all age brackets between 10 to 75 years, and for both males and females.
As found in the recent studies documenting rising mortality rates generally, the increase in suicides in what should be one of the most productive age brackets, people aged 45-64, is horrific: suicides by women of that age increased by 63%; suicides by men, by 43%.
The gender gap, where historically more men commit suicide than women, has narrowed. For example, suicides by women and girls between 10 and 75 rose by 45% since 1999, while the rate of suicide by males "only" rose by 16%. Suicide rates since 1999 for females aged 15-24, 25-44, and 65-74 ranged between 31% and 53%, the report states. And which female age group was found to have the largest increase? Girls aged 10 to 14, whose suicide rate rose by 200% during the time period—tripling from 0.5 per 100,000 in 1999 to 1.5 in 2014!
As American statesman Lyndon LaRouche has emphasized again and again in recent months, such shocking figures are the result of the submission of the United States to a British imperial culture and economy which has robbed people of the meaning of their living. The LaRouche Political Action Committee issued its pamphlet, "The United States Joins the New Silk Road. A Hamiltonian Vision for An Economic Renaissance," precisely as a call to arms in the war to end this literally suicidal submission to that British system.
