Feds killing us – Chuck
AMERICANS spending on DIE suicide because prevention federal five years, has flatlined even as over more the and last more people are killing themselves, Sen. Chuck Schumer said Sunday.
Federal suicide-prevention grants to state governments have been unchanged at $35.43 million a year since 2013, Schumer (D-N.Y.) said.
“The federal government has back-burnered the crisis of suicide by flat-funding critical prevention programs and efforts aimed at reaching people during their darkest hours to try and rescue them,” Schumer said.
Spending on a suicide hotline has been held to $7 million per year, and spending on programs that study and strategize anti-suicide policy has been kept to $5.9 million per year.
Suicide rates rose in all but one state — Nevada — between 1999 and 2016, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said last week. Nearly 45,000 people died in suicides in 2016, the data show.
About 1,600 people die of suicide each year in New York State, the state Department of Health reported in 2014.
From 2014 to 2016, 9.3 out of 100,000 state residents killed themselves each year, the CDC data say.
That’s up from the state’s annual rate of 7.2 suicides per 100,000 from 1999 to 2001.
Men in New York kill themselves at three times the rate of women. The annual suicide rate for New York men was 14.5 per
100,000 from 2014 to 2016; for women the rate was 4.6 per 100,000.
The yearly suicide rate in New Jersey was 9.2 per 100,000 from 2014 to 2016, the CDC says. In Connecticut, the yearly rate was 11.5 per 100,000.
But people in the New York area are less likely to kill themselves than other Americans, the CDC numbers show. From 2014 to 2016, Americans killed themselves at the annual rate of 15.4 per 100,000.
Suicide takes its biggest toll among young people. It’s the second-leading cause of death for people between 10 and 34 years old, government data show. The leading cause of death in that age group is “unintentional injury.” Suicide is the 10th-leading cause of death among Americans of all ages. Heart disease is still the No. 1 killer, the CDC reports.
Schumer cited a bright spot in the matter — the creation of a program, Zero Suicide, which is aimed at educating doctors and health professionals to identify people at risk of killing themselves.
Zero Suicide got $9 million in federal money in 2017, the senator said. Schumer believes the program deserves more.
The new CDC data and media attention to the suicides last week of designer Kate Spade and celebrity chef and TV foodie Anthony Bourdain “put a giant lump in your throat and a hole in your heart,” Schumer said.
He added: “The numbers depict a real public health crisis that requires more federal attention and a ramp up of funding.”