Social media ‘spurring women towards suicide’

SUICIDE among women in their early 20s is at its highest level in two decades, Office for National Statistics figures show, leading experts to warn of a mental health crisis among young women struggling with the pressures of modern life and social media.

While the overall figures for Britain show suicide rates are at a seven-year low, women aged between 20 and 24 are increasingly likely to die by their own hand.

Last year, 106 deaths by suicide were recorded among this age group, the first time the number has been more than 100 since 1992, when it was 111. At 5.2, the rate per 100,000 women is the highest it has been since 1998, when it was 5.7.

Jenny Edwards CBE, chief executive of the Mental Health Foundation, called the figures “troubling”.

“We know that particularly for young women their rate of poor mental health is three times that of their male contemporaries. Something is going on – social media use is one part but another is relationships between the sexes. They’ve got a lot more insecurity in their lives than their parents did,” she said. “There’s a tendency to blame ourselves if things aren’t working out.

“Particularly if the message we’re getting from social media is that everyone else is living fantastic lives, has got good holidays, and good jobs. That’s a fairytale that can affect our overall mental health.”

In recent years, suicide prevention campaigns have focused on men, who still have a much higher rate than women in all age groups and are more than three times more likely to die by suicide than women. The most at-risk group is men in their early 40s, among whom the rate is 23.7 per 100,000.

Prof Louis Appleby, of the University of Manchester, who leads the National Suicide Prevention Strategy for England, said the overall figures were better than past years. In England the overall rate fell from 10.1 to 9.5. However, he said that it was important to watch the figures for young people.

Prof Appleby said it was easy to blame social media. “There is good and bad in most of these social phenomena,” he said, adding that many young people who struggled with mental health had found the internet a source of support.