More evidence of increasing suicide rate
Executive Summary
A study in the American Journal of Psychiatry concludes that suicide rates in children and adolescents in the United States and the Netherlands are increasing. The study suggests that the rise may be associated with the decline of antidepressant prescriptions, which occurred after warnings linked the drugs to higher suicide risk in children, according to the study led by Robert Gibbons, University of Illinois at Chicago. "The data available from the CDC on U.S. suicide rates at the time of the study (through 2004) revealed that there was already a 14 percent increase in child and adolescent suicide rates from 2003 to 2004," the largest rise since 1979, the study states. Other recent research had similar findings, such as an April 2007 report in the Journal of the American Medical Association showing the benefits of antidepressants outweigh the risk of suicide in pediatrics (1"The Pink Sheet" April 23, 2007, In Brief)...