Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 20, 1998; Page A01
The suicide rate of African American teenagers has risen sharply since the 1980s, especially in the South, and is increasing at a pace much faster than that of white teenagers, a new study concludes.
White teenagers are still more likely to commit suicide than blacks. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in a report to be released today, says its latest findings suggest that suicide is an "important and growing problem" among young African Americans and may be linked partly to the growth of the black middle class.
In the report, researchers cite no conclusive cause of the rising suicide rate but say that since many more African Americans are being reared in upwardly mobile families, more of them also may be experiencing the stresses such an environment can create. "These youths may adopt the coping behaviors of the larger society in which suicide is more commonly used in response to depression and hopelessness," the report states.
Although the number of young blacks who commit suicide is still small -- less than five of every 100,000 black teenagers take their own lives -- the rate is much more comparable now to the suicide rate of white teenagers nationally, which is also rising.
In 1980, the suicide rate for young whites was 157 percent greater than it was for young blacks, according to the report. Today, it's 42 percent greater.
The suicide rate of African Americans between the ages of 10 and 19 has increased by 114 percent since 1980, the report found. The largest increase, by far, has occurred in the South, which the report defined to include Maryland, Virginia and the District. The suicide rate among young blacks in southern states has grown by 214 percent. The report gave no breakdown on the suicide rates for individual states.
A total of 3,030 young African Americans have committed suicide since 1980, the report found, and nearly all of those studied involved the use of firearms.
"We're not exactly sure what's causing these changes," said Tonji Durant, lead author of the federal report. "But the gap in suicide rates between young blacks and whites has narrowed so much that it really deserves much more attention."
Sociologists and scholars of African American culture say that suicide has long been considered a taboo in their communities. Even as blacks endured wrenching adversity, suicide has been rare because other social bedrocks -- family and church, for example -- have remained strong and the notion of overcoming struggle has been a powerful article of faith.
"I'm reminded of that old comedian's line -- blacks don't commit suicide because you can't jump out of a basement window," said Glenn Loury, director of the Institute on Race and Social Division at Boston University.
But the study's authors and other scholars say that one consequence of rising prosperity and social integration for blacks over the last few decades has been that some have distanced themselves from family and church and are much more isolated now in times of crisis.
"It's a reasonable hypothesis worth exploring," said Alan Berman, executive director of the American Association of Suicidology. "As minority groups become more like the majority, they do tend to take on some of the problems of the majority."
Others are skeptical. Loury said that he has serious doubts because he sees little evidence of young blacks in large numbers adopting other destructive habits of young whites who are growing up in middle-class or affluent families.
"I think we need to see broader patterns of behavior first before we accept this," he said. "What about bulimia? What about binge drinking? You still don't really see that" among young African Americans.
In the report, researchers offer other possible explanations for the extraordinary increase in suicide rates among young blacks. More African American families may be willing to disclose a teenager's death as a suicide now, they suggest, and despondent youth have much more access to lethal weapons and drugs than they once did.
The access to weapons coupled with the profound despair that many young black men experience in poor communities, where jobs or uplifting role models can be scarce, may be the real root of the rising suicide rates, some African American leaders say.
Kenya Napper Bello, who runs a nonprofit group in Atlanta that counsels young black men against suicide, said many of them speak of feeling deeply disconnected from virtually all of the social institutions that could help them -- family, church, school.
"These statistics are not really surprising," she said. "I see the hopelessness up close all the time. You see it in black-on-black crime, you see it in the high rates of incarceration, you see it in drug abuse. This is just the final straw."