Suicide continues to be one of the primary causes of death among teenagers and conducive research exploring the factors influencing suicide reveal deeper insights into this morbid topic. A research study done on high school students from the USA unveiled a crucial association between suicidal behavior, externalizing behaviors like physical aggression and exposure to violence. Teenagers who had previously carried firearms or engaged in violence were more likely to have an increased risk of attempting suicide, especially when they had access to weapons.
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The findings from the study revealed that access to firearms has a heavy correlation with suicide. State and demographic factors have influenced this correlation in various ways. The data obtained calls for specific interventions towards firearm usage and prevention of violence. This is a wake-up call to address the urgent social issue where adolescents are attempting or dying by suicide due to a history of violence. The underlying risk factors regarding carrying weapons and their influence on suicide rates has not been majorly studied until recently. Associations on the state level have been primarily examined by the new study published by Elsevier and showcased in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
Nearly 234,588 adolescents from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey contributed relevant data for a cross-sectional study that focused on the years between 1991 and 2021. This research provided a broad assessment of the ways in which risk factors involving violence might increase the risk of suicide. This was done by analyzing the link between externalizing behaviours, exposure to violence, history of carrying firearms and suicidal behaviour. Any behaviour that outwardly exhibited violence, aggression or disruption that harms the social environment and the people in it was characterized as externalizing behaviour. For example, aggressively threatening to use a weapon,or engaging in sexual or physical violence.
As the access to firearms is different for each American state, the researchers involved in this study assessed the trends associated with carrying firearms from 16 different American States and revealed that there were differences in access to firearms at a state level among teenagers who had attempted suicide in the year 2021. One of the researchers commented on how suicide is more prevalent among people who live in rural regions as they tend to be isolated and have limited mental health facilities or services but have more access to firearms. The differences in suicide rates in State areas are mainly due to the deaths that involved the usage of weapons.
The researcher also mentioned a surprising trend of a high risk of suicide in states like New York where access to weapons is lower than in states like Montana where gun ownership is higher. It was highlighted that the state-level data was sparse and this had been a hurdle while examining the trends in every state, over a period of time. The lead researcher Katherine M. Keyes, MPH, PhD, Department of Epidemiology, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health elaborated on suicidal behaviour caused by firearm injury being the primary cause of death among youngsters in the United States of America.
She concluded that it is essential to protect the youth by bringing better and stronger protection against the usage of weapons to avoid the risk of self-inflicted violence or death that is prevalent among young individuals who carry weapons or engage in physical aggression or violence. Youth who carry weapons and have higher risks of engaging in physical violence also have a higher, underscoring the need for stronger firearm protections to protect youth health.”
Conclusion
The frequency of deaths by suicide that involved the usage of weapons was found to be higher in the Western States of America. However, there were outliers such as increased suicide risk rate in states like New York where access to guns was lower than states like Montana which had more access to firearms. Yet in some states like Montana, the prevalence of suicide was found to be lower despite having heavier access to weapons. Due to the differences in the accessibility of weapons, laws related to guns and the variations in occurrences of deaths by suicide, it is a crucial requirement to assess the risk of suicide among different States of America and to administer necessary interventions.
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