[ti:Suicide Rates Among Young Americans on the Rise, Especially Girls] [by:www.51voa.com] [00:00.00]更多听力请访问51VOA.COM [00:00.01]Suicide rates among young people in the United States [00:05.14]have been on the rise for almost 10 years, [00:09.55]with the sharpest increase found among girls. [00:13.92]That information comes from a new study published in JAMA Network Open. [00:21.21]The study found that suicides among girls aged 10 to 14 increased [00:28.29]by about 13 percent each year between 2007 and 2016. [00:35.93]Suicides among boys in the same age group rose by 7 percent per year. [00:43.85]Donna Ruch is a researcher at Nationwide Children's Hospital in the state of Ohio. [00:51.69]She was the report's lead writer. [00:54.78]She said the research shows a "significant" increase [01:00.45]in younger female rates of suicide. [01:03.47]Ruch said she believes the bigger increase in deaths among girls [01:09.11]is related to changes in the methods girls choose to try to kill themselves. [01:16.12]"Now they are using more lethal means," she said. [01:20.72]"And that really concerns us." [01:23.23]Suicide is the second leading cause of death [01:27.89]among young people aged 10 to 19 in the United States. [01:33.47]To take a closer look at suicide trends among the young, [01:38.69]Ruch and her team examined nationwide data on suicides [01:43.94]among people aged 10 to 19 from 1975 to 2016. [01:51.81]The researchers identified 85,051 deaths among U.S. youth between those years. [02:00.89]About 80 percent of them were boys. [02:05.05]Rates of suicide in children aged 10 to 14 went down between 1993 and 2007. [02:15.45]After that, they began to rise again, by 12.7 percent per year [02:22.16]among girls and by 7.1 percent among boys. [02:27.11]Similar trends were seen among people aged 15 to 19, [02:33.35]with a decline until 2007, then yearly increases of 7.9 percent [02:41.13]among girls and 3.5 percent among boys. [02:45.73]Ruch and her team cannot explain the increases. [02:50.77]But she said finding a reason is "an important next step." [02:56.53]For now, she advises parents to know the warning signs [03:01.61]that a child might be in danger: "Is the child making suicidal statements? [03:08.25]Are they unhappy for longer periods of time? [03:12.04]Are they withdrawing from friends and school activities?" [03:16.84]If they are, Ruch said, "that's when you should start to consider [03:22.46]taking your child to a mental health professional." [03:26.90]Suicide expert Ian Rockett suggests that the numbers in the study [03:33.17]actually underreport the number of girls who kill themselves. [03:38.60]"We know that females are more inclined [03:42.43]to use drug intoxication as a method," said Rockett, [03:47.54]a professor at West Virginia University in Morgantown [03:51.42]and the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York. [03:56.94]"That's less likely to be picked up as a suicide," Rockett noted. [04:02.73]Rockett believes that media may play a role [04:07.04]in the rising rates of suicide among young people in general. [04:11.53]He points to a soon-to-be-published paper he helped write [04:17.17]that links the Netflix television series "13 Reasons Why" [04:23.23]with increased suicide rates among both boys and girls. [04:27.59]"The association we found is actually stronger in females," he said. [04:33.98]"And that should be a cause for concern related to exposure to mass media." [04:40.78]I'm Ashley Thompson. 更多听力请访问51VOA.COM