Study: U.S. suicides rising; risk high in middle age

Another sad statistic of the Bush administration will be the rise in suicides due to unemployment and foreclosures.

During the depression of 1929 the suicide rate spiked and many Wall Street investors and brokers jumped from high rise buildings after the stock market crash. While they may have lost it all including their life, they failed to realize that suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.
Way to go Bush, and if McCain gets elected, expect the numbers to rise even more. Hey, it'll just be less people to kill when McCain and/or Palin start WWIII!

After a decade-long decrease, U.S. suicide rates have started to rise, largely because of an increase in suicides among middle-aged white men and women.

If the economy continues to decline, suicides could go up, researchers say.

White people age 40 to 64 have "recently emerged as a new high-risk group for suicide," according to the study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

Suicides increased between 1999 and 2005 by about 3 percent annually in white men and 4 percent in white women age 40 to 64, according to Susan Baker, M.P.H., of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, and her colleagues. Suicide rates remained the same in Asians and Native Americans, and declined in blacks.

Overall, the suicide rate rose in the early 1980s, then dropped each year from 1986 to 1999. From 1999 to 2005, however, the rates have increased 0.7 percent annually.

In all, 32,637 people killed themselves in the United States in 2005, a rate of 11 per 100,000 people.

Source: cnn.com

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