[Dean's World] Shay: Black Suicide Attempts Worse Than Thought

[notify at powerblogs.com]

Posted by Shay:
Black Suicide Attempts Worse Than Thought
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1162400615.shtml


   [1]More U.S. blacks attempt suicide than previously thought, according
   to a landmark study appearing in today's Journal of the American
   Medical Association that could help explode the myth that black
   suicides are rare because of cultural and religious views against it.
   The first nationally representative study to look at attempted suicide
   among blacks found that about 70,000 blacks try to kill themselves
   each year and 4%, or roughly 1.4 million, attempt suicide at least
   once in their lives. That lifetime rate is similar to that of whites
   but higher than the 2.8% found among blacks in previous surveys. Other
   research has shown that the actual suicide rate in whites is about
   twice as high as in blacks, though rising rates among young black men
   have narrowed the racial gap.

   The study is the first to look at suicidal behavior among the two
   leading ethnic groups within the U.S. black community â black
   Americans and Caribbean Americans. The lifetime prevalence of suicide
   attempts was much higher among Caribbean-American black men, at 7.5%,
   suggesting that about 53,000 try at least once to kill themselves. The
   reasons for that relatively high rate are uncertain.

   Suicide attempts in the study were least common among blacks in the
   South. While depression is strongly tied to suicidal behavior in
   whites, anxiety disorders were more common than depression in blacks
   who attempted suicide in the study. That is an important racial
   difference that could alert doctors to black patients who might be
   contemplating suicide, said Alvin Poussaint, a Harvard University
   psychiatry professor and race relations specialist.

   My response: When I read this story, I thought of the recent
   controversy surrounding whether football star Terrell Owens recently
   tried to kill himself with those pills. About this study, I say: slow
   down. They added folks of Caribbean immigrant descent into the mix,
   whose higher rate in turn jacks up the overall black stats. Would the
   rate of native black Americans (for lack of a better term) be
   significantly lower minus the addition of these black immigrants and
   the children of recent black immigrants? Perhaps blacks of Caribbean
   descent have a different cultural viewpoint toward suicide than native
   black Americans do. And it should be noted that most blacks live in
   the U.S. South, where the study showed the black rate was the lowest.

References

   1. http://www.christianpost.com/article/20061101/25708.htm