Study: Friendships More Vital to Teen Girls
Jan. 29 -- Suicide is now the third leading cause of death among young people in America today, and girls are far more likely to "seriously consider" suicide than boys, according to a new study that is as surprising as it is depressing.
Only accidents, mainly motor vehicle, and homicide outrank suicide as the leading causes of death among adolescents and young adults who are 15 to 24 years old.
What in the world has gone wrong here? What could cause so many young people to lose hope so completely that they decide to end their own lives? What does that say about our society in general?
And why are girls more likely than boys to seriously consider, and even attempt, suicide?
Force of Friendship
Part of the answer emerges in a major study published in the January issue of the American Journal of Public Health. The simple answer is girls need close, personal friends more than boys, and when those friendships fail girls are far more likely to think of ending it all.
The study, by sociologists James Moody of Ohio State University and Peter Bearman of the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy at Columbia University, draws from a wealth of data collected during 1994 and 1995. That data is part of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, which resulted from interviews with thousands of adolescents across the country in an effort to measure the health and welfare of our young people.
Bearman and Moody combed through the data to see what they could learn about teenage suicides. They had expected to find some difference between boys and girls, but they were not prepared for the scale of that difference.
They found that girls were twice as likely as boys to attempt suicide if they had few friends and were isolated from their peers.
"That's an astonishing figure," says Moody. Isolation among girls ranks right up there with having a friend who commits suicide in terms of causing a youngster to think about ending it all. But it had no effect on boys.
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