How About Some Bad News With Your Afternoon Slump?

Getting tired? This is about the time of day I get sleepy. Anyway, total non-sequiter. So here’s the bad news, from the L.A. Times:

Suicides among U.S. adolescents dropped in 2005 after a sharp rise the previous year, but the number still remained high compared with historical trends, researchers said Tuesday.

The youth suicide rate had been falling steadily for a decade, but shot upward by 18% in 2004.

But then it fell. So now I’m confused. Like, is it bad news? Or good news, actually? But wait. From the Washington Post:

Researchers thought a spike in youth suicides in 2004 may have been an anomaly. But the new study found the increase in suicides continued during 2005.

Looking at suicide trends among youngsters over a 15-year period, Jeff Bridge, from Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, found the rates of suicide among youths aged 10 to 19 were higher in 2004 and 2005 than would have been expected, based on suicide rate trends from 1996 to 2003.

Oh, that is bad. But then, from Bloomberg:

While the rate of suicides fell 5.3 percent in 2005 from a year earlier, it remained higher than in 2003, when the number of teenagers killing themselves reached the low point of a steady eight-year decline, said researchers led by Jeff Bridge of the Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. The report was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

You know what? When I took the GRE, I scored 310 out of 800 on the math section. Untimed. That’s right — I got a dispensation for having a learning disability, and I still couldn’t do it. So all these stats make my head hurt. You figure it out.

liz | 2:57 PM | Uncategorized