2017 June 5^th

Mona Charen has an interesting, if misleading, column in today’s paper. She claims that there is a huge spike in the suicide rates for young women.  Indeed there is, particularly among those from age 10 to 14 where rates have tripled from 1994 to 2014. They have moved up from .5 percent to 1.5 percent.

To bolster her argument Ms. Charen cited the University of Central Florida where she claims, “…the requests for mental health treatment have risen 12 percent annually for the past decade.”

Ms. Charen gets to her analysis of the cause: It is the increase in teens living in single parent homes. She writes, “Teens who live with a single parent have twice the rate of suicide attempts as teens who live with both parents.” Interestingly she cites the Journal of Transactional Psychiatry that claims the rate of depression is 36 percent for girls but only 13.6 percent for boys.

The first of several bits of curious data that apparently do not puzzle Ms. Charen at all: Surely male children and female children are equally likely to come from single parent homes. If that is the case then why are females nearly three times as likely to suffer from such wicked bouts of depression? Ms. Charen just sticks with her single parent cause for all parties and doesn’t explore the difference in gender susceptibility.

While the depression/suicide rates for very young women from 10 to 14 have tripled over 20 years these are still very small samples, from .5 percent to 1.5 percent; when sub-samples get that small they are very unreliable. It is unlikely that the tripling is accurate but that doesn’t mean there is not an important increase. Over this same time period, 20 years, there are increases for most female age groups; the 25 to 44 age group shows an increase from 5.5 to 7.2 per thousand. Is Charen prepared to blame that increase on single parenting these women might have endured 30 years ago?

We’ll look at some other data Charen presents: The University of Central Florida, you may remember, where the requests for mental health treatment rose “12 percent annually for the past decade.” That sounds serious until we find out that the enrollment at this school went from 33,453 in 2000 to 60,810 in 2014. It is fascinating that Charen doesn’t mention the enrollment increase. Why do you suppose she doesn’t? She has an agenda and it is to support the notion that depression in young women is due to the increase in single-parent households.

The percentage of annulments and divorces have actually dropped between 2001 and 2014. In 2000 there were 8.26 divorces/1000 marriages while in 2014 this had dropped to 6.86 divorces/ 1000 marriages.

Keep in mind that many kids live with mothers who never married to begin with so divorce statistics are only part of the story. Even so, it is clear that Charen is pushing an enormously oversimplified solution to this problem to fit he preconceived agenda.