Young people who live in rural areas kill themselves at twice the rate as youth who live in cities, according to a new study in the journal JAMA Pediatrics.
There aren’t clear-cut explanations for suicide, but geographical differences seem to play a role, the researchers found. People who live in rural areas have less access to mental health services, more stigma surrounding help-seeking and freer access to guns than their urban counterparts.
The study, which looked at data from more than 66,000 young people ages 10 to 24 who died by suicide in the United States, found that the gap between the urban and rural suicide rates grew significantly between 1996 and 2010.
About half of the people in the sample used a firearm to end their lives, followed by a third who died by suffocation. In rural communities, young people were more likely to use a gun—no coincidence, according to the study authors, since suicide rates in urban communities dropped alongside a decline in urban gun ownership.
Geography may partially explain the difference between rural and urban suicide rates, according to the study. Mental health services can be harder to access in rural areas; more than half of rural communities in the U.S. don’t have a local mental health worker like a psychiatrist or psychologist.
Click here to read more.
SOURCE: TIME, Justin Worland
BCNN1 WP 