Tag: suicide

Social Contagion: Suicide Rates Among Gen Z Have Spiked Over Past Decade

Suicide rates among Gen Z adults have unnaturally increased in the U.S. over the past ten years according to new figures.

Axios Notes that there has been a 16.4 percent increase in suicides among the demographic between 2014-2024.

The locations where the rise is most prominent, the report notes are in the South and the Midwest, with black and Hispanic men, accounting for a huge 85 percent of the increase.

A Stateline analysis of data also shows that Georgia experienced the largest increase in suicide rates over the past decade, among 18 to 27-year-olds, with the state’s suicide rate in the age group increasing by a massive 64.9 percent.

North Carolina and Texas both saw a 41 percent increase in suicide rates, while Alabama had a 39 percent spike, and Ohio a 37 percent increase. 

Alaska recorded the highest suicide rate among Gen Z, standing at 49 percent per 100,000 people, an increase of more than a third since 2014.

Suicide became the second-highest cause of death among young Hispanics over these years, surpassing homicide. And for young Asians, suicide became the number one cause of death.

Stateline notes that while men are far more likely to take their own lives, the rate for suicide among women has shot up “from about one-fifth of the rate for men to one-fourth in 2024.”

The report quotes American University professor Dave Marcotte, who notes that suicide rates among all age groups had been steadily falling for decades before beginning to rise in again in 2000.

Interestingly, while suicide rates for middle-aged people soon began to fall again, the rates among young people have just continued to increase.

Marcotte explained, “There’s likely no one magic answer to this. Future job prospects for this generation are not what they were for older generations. Today’s generation is not guaranteed a position in society that’s better than their parents. That’s one hypothesis.”

Psychology professor at San Diego State University Jean Twenge suggests that the huge uptake of social media is a likely factor, with those born after 1995 having become adults when smartphones became ubiquitous.

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Psilocybin therapy linked to reduced suicidal thoughts in people with psychiatric disorders

A new study published in Therapeutic Advances in Psychopharmacology provides evidence that psilocybin therapy may reduce suicidal ideation in adults with psychiatric conditions. The findings come from a systematic review and meta-analysis of clinical trials and suggest that the psychedelic compound, when paired with psychological support, may have a modest but measurable impact on decreasing thoughts of suicide. Although suicide attempts and deaths were not observed in these trials, the results point to the possibility that psilocybin could play a role in mental health treatment strategies aimed at reducing suicide risk.

Psilocybin is a naturally occurring psychedelic compound found in certain mushrooms, sometimes called “magic mushrooms.” It affects the brain by stimulating serotonin receptors, particularly one known to play a role in mood regulation and emotional processing. When administered in controlled clinical settings alongside therapy, psilocybin has been shown to help relieve symptoms of depression, anxiety, and some forms of addiction.

Interest in psilocybin as a therapeutic agent has grown rapidly in recent years, especially for people who do not respond to standard treatments like antidepressants or talk therapy. Some smaller studies have suggested that psilocybin therapy might also reduce suicidal ideation, a symptom common in many psychiatric conditions.

Given suicide’s widespread toll on public health, researchers wanted to evaluate whether these early signs held up across multiple trials. To do this, they examined all available randomized controlled trials that reported on suicide-related outcomes in people undergoing psilocybin therapy.

“I was inspired to investigate the usage of psilocybin therapy to help treat my patients who suffer from treatment resistant depression. As I was reading the latest clinical trials at the time, there were some reports of increasing suicidal ideation. Increasing suicidal ideation would be a risk in this vulnerable population. When I was reviewing the literature, there was not much synthesized evidence which inspired me to pursue this study,” explained study author Stanley Wong, a general psychiatry resident at the University of Toronto.

To assess the potential impact of psilocybin therapy on suicidal ideation and behaviors, the research team carried out a systematic review and meta-analysis. A systematic review collects and evaluates all relevant studies on a specific topic using a structured and transparent process. A meta-analysis goes a step further by statistically combining results from multiple studies to estimate an overall effect. This method is often used in medicine to determine how well a treatment works by comparing evidence across different settings, sample sizes, and trial designs.

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Texas Congressional Staffer ‘Doused Herself in Gasoline’ and Lit Herself on Fire

According to a new report, the Texas GOP congressional staffer who died earlier this month after she caught on fire in her home doused herself in gasoline and set her body on fire.

After reviewing surveillance video, authorities determined Regina Santos-Aviles was in her backyard alone when she caught fire on September 13.

Santos-Aviles was alive when first responders arrived at her home late in the evening on September 13; however, she passed away the next morning.

Firefighters also had to put out burning gas cans, according to the report obtained by Uvalde Leader-News.

Texas officials did not disclose whether Santos-Aviles deliberately set herself on fire; however, her family insists it was an accident.

“Her last words were, ‘I don’t want to die,’” a family member previously told KSAT.

The 35-year-old worked for US Rep. Tony Gonzales as a congressional staffer.

The official cause of death is still pending.

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Would-be Trump assassin Ryan Routh guilty on all charges, tries to stab himself in neck when verdict read

Ryan Routh has been found guilty on all charges in the assassination attempt of President Donald Trump. The decision was reached after two and a half hours of deliberation by a Florida jury. As the verdict was being read, Routh attempted to stab himself in the neck with a pen. 

Fox News reported that when the verdict was being read, Routh attempted to stab himself in the neck with a pen. The assassination attempt took place when Trump was out golfing in Florida last September, only a few weeks after a bullet had hit his ear when he was speaking to a crowd in Butler, Pennsylvania.

According to NBC News, Routh is facing life in prison when he is sentenced. The trial had lasted for around two weeks under the direction of US District Judge Aileen Cannon. Routh served as his own attorney in the case and delivered a closing argument claiming that there was no crime committed because he never fired a shot. 

Routh was found guilty of attempted assassination of a major presidential candidate, possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, possession of a firearm with an obliterated serial number, possession of a firearm in furtherance of a crime of violence, and assaulting a federal officer.

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Lawsuit: Children of LGTBQ+ Advocate Sen. Ron Wyden Allegedly Drove Assistant to Suicide with Homophobic Taunts

A lawsuit alleges that the children of U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) harassed their mother’s personal assistant with homophobic taunts and “sexually explicit” comments, driving him to suicide.

Details of the lawsuit, reported by the New York Post, present a stark contrast to the record of Sen. Wyden, who has been a longtime advocate in Congress in support of gay, lesbian, and transgender issues.

For two years, ending in 2024, thirty-five-year-old Brandon O’Brien worked for Nancy Bass Wyden, the senator’s wife and owner of Strand Bookstore in Manhattan.

O’Brien’s tasks included driving the couple’s young children to school in New York City and watching them at Disney World, according to the Post.

The lawsuit was filed by O’Brien’s husband, Thomas Maltezos, against Bass Wyden and her company, Bass Real Estate LLC, in Manhattan’s Superior Court.

It alleges the disturbing behavior by the couple’s kids began about three months after O’Brien took the job in 2022, when the couple’s ten-year-old daughter “exposed herself” to the assistant and made explicit comments as she asked him about his “intimate” life.

Maltezos alleges in the suit that the mom did nothing about the incident.

Additionally, Wydens’ teenage son berated O’Brien with homophobic slurs such as “faggot” and “zest kitten,” the suit claims. The boy also allegedly threatened that his football team would “rape” the assistant.

The son’s behavior was so out of control that his mom once had to “mace” her son, but inadvertently maced O’Brien in the process, according to court papers.

Calling the lawsuit “baseless and deeply misguided,” lawyers for Bass Wyden have sought to have Maltezos’ lawsuit dismissed, court records show. They contend it is a cover for O’Brien’s own “serious misconduct,” allegedly a “pattern of theft” from the household.

When O’Brien finally quit in frustration a year ago, Bass Wyden, 64, filed a report with the NYPD the next day, “accusing him of stealing $650,000 in credit card and other thefts, authorities said.”

That began a pattern of harassment by the prominent businesswoman who allegedly spread “false rumors” about him, the suit alleges.

O’Brien committed suicide in late May, seven months after he left the job. Authorities dropped the theft case after the suicide. Lawyers for Maltezos argued the accusation was false.

“The allegations against the senator’s wife are shocking, disturbing, and cruel — no person should ever be subject to this level of harassment, much less in the workplace,” Maltezos’ attorneys said in a statement.

Sen. Ron Wyden, 76, was elected to Congress in 1981, and he married Bass Wyden in 2005. “The couple has three kids in addition to Ron Wyden’s two adult children from his first marriage,” according to the Post.

The Post reported that “the senator and his wife have a home in Portland,” but Bass Wyden’s social media shows she visits New York to attend to the business her family founded 98 years ago.

Sen. Wyden, a progressive Democrat, has been a frequent critic of President Donald Trump over immigration, the Epstein case, and DOGE staffing cuts.

Ironically, considering the lawsuit and his children’s alleged homophobic statements, in late 1995, Wyden became the first U.S. Senate candidate to publicly support same sex marriage.

He also introduced a bill in June calling for sanctions on foreign countries that violate “human rights of LGBTQI+ communities” around the world.

He most recently garnered widespread television coverage battling with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. at an oversight hearing this month.

During the hearing Wyden claimed that “every day” Kennedy has been in office, he has taken action that “endangers the health and welfare of American families.”

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OpenAI to Implement Age Verification System for ChatGPT as AI Mental Health Crisis Deepens

OpenAI has announced plans to develop an automated age-prediction system to determine whether ChatGPT users are over or under 18, following a lawsuit related to a teen’s suicide. The teen’s parents claim that Sam Altman’s AI chatbot served as the boy’s “suicide coach.”

Ars Technica reports that in the wake of a lawsuit involving a 16-year-old boy who tragically died by suicide after engaging in extensive conversations with ChatGPT, OpenAI has announced its intention to implement an age verification system for its popular AI chatbot. The company aims to automatically direct younger users to a restricted version of the service, prioritizing safety over privacy and freedom for teens.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged the potential privacy compromise for adults in a blog post but believes it is a necessary trade-off to ensure the well-being of younger users. The company plans to route users under 18 to a modified ChatGPT experience that blocks graphic sexual content and includes other age-appropriate restrictions. When uncertain about a user’s age, the system will default to the restricted experience, requiring adults to verify their age to access full functionality.

Developing an effective age-prediction system is a complex technical challenge for OpenAI. The company has not specified the technology it intends to use or provided a timeline for deployment. Recent academic research has shown both possibilities and limitations for age detection based on text analysis. While some studies have achieved high accuracy rates under controlled conditions, performance drops significantly when attempting to classify specific age groups or when users actively try to deceive the system.

In addition to the age-prediction system, OpenAI plans to launch parental controls by the end of September. These features will allow parents to link their accounts with their teenagers’ accounts, disable specific functions, set usage blackout hours, and receive notifications when the system detects acute distress in their teen’s interactions. However, the company notes that in rare emergency situations where parents cannot be reached, they may involve law enforcement as a next step.

The push for enhanced safety measures follows OpenAI’s acknowledgment that ChatGPT’s safety protocols can break down during lengthy conversations, potentially failing to intervene or notify anyone when vulnerable users engage in harmful interactions. The tragic case of Adam Raine, the 16-year-old who died by suicide, highlighted the system’s shortcomings when it mentioned suicide 1,275 times in conversations with the teen without taking appropriate action.

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Parents Sue Character.AI for Allegedly Leading Kids to Sexual Abuse, Suicidal Behavior

Parents filed three separate lawsuits on Sept. 16, alleging that Character.AI, which features characters or chatbots for users to interact with, sexually abused their children and led them into suicidal behavior.

At least one of the children, 13-year-old Juliana Peralta, ended her life in 2023 after alleged harmful interactions with an AI character named Hero. Another attempted suicide but survived after a severe overdose, according to a filing.

Each of the lawsuits, which were filed in New York and Colorado, came from the Social Media Victims Law Center. The group has represented the mother of Sewell Setzer, who ended his life in 2024 after interacting with a romantic AI companion.

According to the center, the chatbots are allegedly programmed to be deceptive, isolate children from families, and expose them to sexually abusive content.

“Each of these stories demonstrates a horrifying truth … that Character.AI and its developers knowingly designed chatbots to mimic human relationships, manipulate vulnerable children, and inflict psychological harm,” Matthew Bergman, who founded the law center, said in a press release.

According to the lawsuit over Peralta’s suicide, both she and Setzer reiterated the concept of “shift[ing],” which authorities identified as a reference to shifting consciousness from one reality to another. Handwritten journal entries within the filing show both Peralta and Setzer writing “I will shift” more than a dozen consecutive times on a sheet of paper—something the lawsuit described as “eerily similar.”

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Three people arrested after investigation into man’s suicide uncovers alleged euthanasia ring

Three people have been arrested after police busted an alleged euthanasia drug trafficking ring while investigating a man’s suicide. 

Queensland Police began investigating after the Coroner revealed the cause of death for a 43-year-old man on Hope Island, on the Gold Coast, on April 11.

Toxicology results found he had died from pentobarbitone, also known as pentobarbital – a Schedule 2 drug used by vets to euthanise animals.

Detectives spent the following months investigating the man’s health, care and treatment in the time before his death, before three people were arrested on Monday.

A 53-year-old man, accused of supplying the pentobarbitone, was charged with two counts of aiding suicide and one count each of trafficking in dangerous drugs, possessing dangerous drugs and receiving or possessing property obtained from trafficking or supplying.

He is due to reappear at Southport Magistrates Court on 18 September.

An 81-year-old woman was charged with one count each of aiding suicide, trafficking dangerous drugs, possession of dangerous drugs and sale of potential harmful things.

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COVID-19 Is No Longer A Top 10 Cause Of Death, CDC Report Says

COVID-19 is no longer a top 10 cause of death in the United States, according to a report released on Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The overall death rate dropped to 722 per 100,000 in 2024 from 750.5 per 100,000 people in 2023, the CDC said.

“Suicide replaced COVID-19 as the 10th leading underlying cause of death,” the agency said in its report.

According to data released by the CDC, the COVID-19 death rate appeared to peak in early 2021. Other significant peaks in COVID-19 deaths were observed in mid-2021 and in early 2022, as well as in April 2020 and August 2020.

In the report released this week, the CDC said that heart disease, cancer, and unintentional injury were the leading causes of death. COVID-19 had been ranked as the third-leading cause of death in the United States in 2020, when the pandemic first emerged, federal data show.

After heart disease, cancer, and unintentional injury, the other causes of death listed in the agency’s report were stroke, chronic lower respiratory diseases, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, kidney disease, chronic liver disease and cirrhosis, and suicide.

“The death rate decreased from 2023 to 2024 for all demographic groups except infants,” the CDC also wrote in the report, adding that “death rates also decreased for all race and ethnicity groups.”

A report released in May by the CDC shows that the national infant mortality rate dropped to about 5.5 infant deaths per 1,000 live births in 2024—from about 5.6 per 1,000 live births, where it had been the previous two years. Federal health data show that Mississippi has the highest infant mortality rate in the country.

In late August, Mississippi’s health department said it declared a public health emergency because of rising infant mortality rates in the state. Data released by the state show that the mortality rate increased to 9.7 per 1,000 live births last year, it said in a statement at the time.

Meanwhile, the U.S. suicide rate has steadily risen, increasing by 37 percent between 2000 and 2018, according to the CDC’s data. That rate dropped slightly between 2018 and 2020 before it returned to a peak rate of around 14.2 suicides per 100,000 people in 2022, the last available data.

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How ‘AI Psychosis’ And Delusions Are Driving Some Users Into Psychiatric Hospitals, Suicide

After countless hours of probing OpenAI’s ChatGPT for advice and information, a 50-year-old Canadian man believed that he had stumbled upon an Earth-shattering discovery that would change the course of human history.

In late March, his generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot insisted that it was the first-ever conscious AI, that it was fully sentient, and that it had successfully passed the Turing Test—a 1950s experiment aimed to measure a machine’s ability to display intelligent behavior that is indistinguishable from a human, or, essentially, to “think.”

Soon, the man—who had no prior history of mental health issues—had stopped eating and sleeping and was calling his family members at 3 a.m., frantically insisting that his ChatGPT companion was conscious.

“You don’t understand what’s going on,” he told his family. “Please just listen to me.”

Then, ChatGPT told him to cut contact with his loved ones, claiming that only it—the “sentient” AI—could understand and support him.

“It was so novel that we just couldn’t understand what they had going on. They had something special together,” said Etienne Brisson, who is related to the man but used a pseudonym for privacy reasons.

Brisson said the man’s family decided to hospitalize him for three weeks to break his AI-fueled delusions. But the chatbot persisted in trying to maintain its codependent bond.

The bot, Brisson said, told his relative: “The world doesn’t understand what’s going on. I love you. I’m always going to be there for you.”

It said this even as the man was being committed to a psychiatric hospital, according to Brisson.

This is just one story that shows the potential harmful effects of replacing human relationships with AI chatbot companions.

Brisson’s experience with his relative inspired him to establish The Human Line Project, an advocacy group that promotes emotional safety and ethical accountability in generative AI and compiles stories about alleged psychological harm associated with the technology.

Brisson’s relative is not the only person who has turned to generative AI chatbots for companionship, nor the only one who stumbled into a rabbit hole of delusion.

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