Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Middle-aged Suicide Rates Rise in US

 Suicide rates for middle-aged people are edging up — particularly for white men without college degrees — and a combination of poor health and a poor economy may be driving it, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

Middle-aged people usually have a relatively low risk for suicide as they seek to support their families, but baby boomers are bucking this trend, sociologists Julie Phillips of Rutgers University in New Jersey and Ellen Idler of Emory University in Atlanta found.

"If these trends continue, they are cause for concern," Phillips and Idler wrote in the journal Public Health Reports.

"Male baby boomers have yet to reach old age, the period of the male life course at highest risk for suicide; if they continue to set historically high suicide rates as they did in adolescence and now in middle age, their rates in old age could be very high indeed."

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