MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — A WVU professor is part of a study that found statistics on causes of death aren’t accurately portraying a growing trend in suicide or self-injury deaths.
“Suicide was likely to become seriously under counted because of the escalation in the drug intoxication death rates that’s been occurring in the U.S. going back to the 1990’s,” explained Ian Rockett, Ph.D., WVU Department of Public Health professor.
Rockett’s study combined estimated deaths from drug self-intoxication with registered suicides to better represent the true death toll from self-injury.
“What we wanted to do is to look at self-injury in a broader way to say it’s more than suicides. It includes other kinds self injurious deaths that may or may not have had a suicidality underlying them,” Rockett summarized.
The study, reported in JAMA Psychiatry online, was conducted in conjunction with 7 different universities. Rockett said he purposely included medical examiners, toxicologists, psychiatrists and emergency medicine professionals to help with the study.
“We found that, in fact, the self-injury mortality rate, as we had calculated it, it actually converged with the diabetes mortality rate which is profound I think,” Rockett expressed.
The professor also found it astonishing that the self-injury death rate rose from 14 to 24 for every 100,000 people from 1999 to 2014. It continually exceeded the kidney disease mortality rate, surpassed the influenza and pneumonia rate by 2006 and matched the diabetes rate in 2014.
“The people who are dying from self intoxication, whether they are intending on dying or not, are mainly engaging in very high risk behavior and most of them know on some level that they are,” Rockett said. “So, we feel that most of these deaths do belong in a self-injury mortality category.”
According to Rockett, the miscategorizing stalls finding a potential solution.
“The problem gets dilute. And, mental illness tends to be on a back burner because both the suicides and non-suicide drug intoxication deaths are still stigmatized.”
Self-injury caused 1.4 times more deaths than suicide alone in 1999, but 1.8 times more by 2014.