Suicide now kills more Americans than car accidents

[conuly]

This is partially because the death rate due to car crashes has gone down significantly, by about 25% - very good news! - but it's ALSO partially because suicides have gone up. Not so good.

I wonder how they tally up people who commit suicide by crashing a car or jumping into traffic? Also, I wonder if I should conveniently forget this little fact. See, whenever somebody loudly declaims how unsafe it is "nowadays" and how awful it is that ANYbody could EVER let their child go OUTSIDE where all the STRANGERS are (and walking to school alone is right out, of course), I pop up and point out that the single most dangerous thing most people do to their child every day is drive them somewhere. Death by strangers? Rare. Death by being unattended? Not that common. Death by cars? It is, I tell them, the leading cause of death for all Americans.

And now I can't say that, can I? It's probably still true that it's the leading cause of death for Americans under 15 (who are, perforce, non-drivers), but it's a bit wordy.

Comments

[redbird]

That's specifically within injury-related deaths: just glancing at the CDC's chart, while "accidental injury" as a total category is the largest cause of death for children aged 1-15, if car crashes are separated from other injuries, cancer might be the largest cause of death for ages 5-9. And the leading cause of death from birth to age 15 appears to be congenital abnormalities (just eyeballing the chart).

But if you wanted to be scrupulous rather than make a—valid—point, the leading causes of death for all Americans are heart disease and cancer.

[conuly]

Oh, don't talk to me about cancer. Apparently, the reason so many Americans die of cancer is because there's a high correlation between available (if not great) healthcare + high income and dying of cancer, probably because cancer's a slow killer and people in poor countries with no healthcare die of other things first or, if they DO die of cancer, don't get diagnosed first so it doesn't count.

But it doesn't *matter*, because regardless everybody in the world will insist it's because we watch TV/eat pesticide-laden foods/eat pesticide-laden foods while watching TV/have too much autism (because of the pesticide-laden foods and TV watching)/vaccinate/are cursed (for eating pesticide-laden foods, vaccinating, and watching TV).

/tangent

And thank you for the update. I just don't want to have to change my spiel. I really dislike change.

[sayga.livejournal.com]

You may not be able to say that car accidents are the number one cause of death, but that's ok, because what you're trying to get at is that strangers AREN'T the number one cause of death, right? (I'm more worried about non-lethal actions to my kids by strangers than death itself, but either would be horrific). I mean, is death by strangers isn't even in the top 10, then that makes its point fairly well. "Even suicide and car accidents are far more likely than death or abduction by strangers." Does that still ruin it for you? (And on the article itself...scary! but I did kind of giggle as the guy said "the driving force" when discussing what caused suicide to be more prevalent than car crashes...).

[conuly]

Well, if it's any consolation, your kids are much less likely to be harmed by a stranger than by somebody known to them.