Today's edition comes from a USNA email about the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
Too many Americans are experiencing suicide and mental health crises without the support and care they need. In 2020 alone, the US had one death by suicide about every 11 minutes and for people aged 10-34 years, suicide is a leading cause of death.
First off, let's state the obvious: suicide and mental health are important topics. Today's TBF is not to belittle or lessen the attention of things like 988 and other work to prevent suicides. Why then, is this TBF? As a data scientist, you want to evaluate the claims people make using data, and these two sentences are no different.
True? yes, suicide is indeed a leading cause of death in 10-34 year olds.
Intention? to convince the reader that "too many Americans are experiencing suicide..."
False? misleading. While it is true that suicide is a leading cause of death (unintentional injury is the leading cause by a large margin), we need to consider the other causes of death in 10-34 year olds. Do you think that age group has lots of causes of death? It's actually the healthiest age group, so is the least likely to die naturally. Since that's the case, suicide bubbles up to be the leading cause because there just aren't many other causes. The older age brackets have heart disease and other ailments. To drive this point home, let's actually compare age groups by looking at the suicide rates by age in the US:
The age group with the FEWEST suicides per capita is 15-24 years. If it sounds like that contradicts today's TBF of "leading cause of death in 10-34 year olds", welcome to TBF! Both statements are factually true (btw look at the 2020 COVID year and how lines crossed...perhaps a more convincing trend to investigate). Does that mean suicide is not important to address? Of course not, but perhaps we can more thoughtfully consider how we use data to support how we talk about it.