Drinking age and suicide?
The Herald says “Lower drinking age blamed for high rate of youth deaths” and quotes a University of Auckland researcher, Dr Anne Beautrais,
“Addressing alcohol use and binge drinking in young people in New Zealand is one of the most obvious avenues to reducing both suicide and traffic mortality.”
Dr Beautrais points out that the high suicide rate in NZ can’t just be attributed to better reporting than in other countries. The overall youth death rate is high in NZ, and while diagnosis of suicide might be variable, diagnosis of death is pretty reliable. That all makes sense. Road deaths are an important component, and there you’d expect lowering the drinking age to have some effect.
I’m less convinced by the drinking-age argument for suicide. One reason is the US experience, where the Reagan administration raised the drinking age to 21 in 1984. The graph below (data from CDC) shows US male suicide rates by age group across time, and there’s really no sign of a decrease in 1984
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
What’s interesting is that the suicide deaths per 100,000 in the story were quoted as 44 in 1995 and 29 in 2009. So they went down even though the drinking age dropped from 20 to 18 in 1999…
12 years ago