Japan has the highest suicide rate among youth across all industrialized nations
I'd like to know what source you have for this statement, because the last time I checked the issue with World Health Organization figures, the statement you just made was incorrect. The WHO figures are stratified by age groups (which, if followed over time in WHO annual reports, can be tracked as age cohorts), and although Japan has long had a higher AGGREGATE suicide rate than the United States, manifested especially in a high rate of suicide by the elderly (age cohorts born before World War II), it has often in my lifetime had a lower YOUTH suicide rate than the United States. Moreover, in many of the postwar decades the youth suicide rate in Japan was declining while the youth suicide rate in the United States was rising.
Here's a little snippet of a FAQ I prepared in the 1990s to show the youth suicide trend for the United States to that decade: "In the United States, recent studies suggest that between 5 and 10 percent of adolescents have made suicide attempts . . . Suicide is currently the third leading cause of death among 15-to-24-year-olds, . . . Moreover, this incidence has increased threefold from the 1950s to the 1980s (Berman & Jobes, 1991; Fingerhut & Kleinman, 1988) . . ." -- James Zimmerman, "Treating Suicidal Adolescents: Is It Really Worth It?" in Treatment Approaches with Suicidal Adolescents (1995).
As in all such matters, if any participant here can point to current officially gathered statistics by an internationally comparable methodology (for suicide, that is the WHO statistics) with age stratification and a time series for each country, I would be glad to check the details.
I'd like to know what source you have for this statement, because the last time I checked the issue with World Health Organization figures, the statement you just made was incorrect. The WHO figures are stratified by age groups (which, if followed over time in WHO annual reports, can be tracked as age cohorts), and although Japan has long had a higher AGGREGATE suicide rate than the United States, manifested especially in a high rate of suicide by the elderly (age cohorts born before World War II), it has often in my lifetime had a lower YOUTH suicide rate than the United States. Moreover, in many of the postwar decades the youth suicide rate in Japan was declining while the youth suicide rate in the United States was rising.
Here's a little snippet of a FAQ I prepared in the 1990s to show the youth suicide trend for the United States to that decade: "In the United States, recent studies suggest that between 5 and 10 percent of adolescents have made suicide attempts . . . Suicide is currently the third leading cause of death among 15-to-24-year-olds, . . . Moreover, this incidence has increased threefold from the 1950s to the 1980s (Berman & Jobes, 1991; Fingerhut & Kleinman, 1988) . . ." -- James Zimmerman, "Treating Suicidal Adolescents: Is It Really Worth It?" in Treatment Approaches with Suicidal Adolescents (1995).
As in all such matters, if any participant here can point to current officially gathered statistics by an internationally comparable methodology (for suicide, that is the WHO statistics) with age stratification and a time series for each country, I would be glad to check the details.