The US is pretty much also the only country where suicides are increasing.
When it comes to spending on social welfare, the U.S. is at the low end of the spectrum relative to Western Europe. For example, only 18.8 percent of the U.S. GDP is spent on social welfare, while most of the OECD nations spend at least 25 percent of their GDP. Our rates of suicide are increasing while their rates fall.
of course it's way more complicated and nuanced than my one example.
edit - no? is this wrong?
Suicide rates in order per 100k: South Korea 20.2, Belgium 15.7, Japan 14.3, Finland 13.8, US 13.3, Iceland 13.3, France 12.1, Sweden 11.7, Australia 11.7, New Zealand 11.6, Switzerland 11.3, Ireland 10.9, Canada 10.4, Norway 10.1
Others in Europe: Russia 26, Lithuania 25.7, Belarus 21.4, Ukraine 18.5, Latvia 17.2, Estonia 14.4, Hungary 13.6, Moldova 13.4, Poland 13.4, Slovenia 13.3, Austria 11.4
Why are Europeans killing themselves at such high rates?
So the initial assertion was not compelling.
> it is rate of change which has people concerned.
Do you have any source about people being concerned (what people?) for the new goalpost?
The elephant(s) in the room is(are) of course Russia and within the EU - Poland(population: 38mln) - but in these cases the explanation as to why it happens is pretty obvious.
Honest question, I really dont know.
Having a terminal illness at age 90 and being clinically depressed at age 18 are very different things (obviously).
All the other European ones you mention other than Finland (where the suicide rate is believed to be linked to being dark for half the year) are Eastern european former communist states. There's still a lag in healthcare modernisation there.
CDC wonder[1] has data from 1999-2016, when I plotted the appropriate ICD-10 codes[2] I found this is a misleading way of describing the data: https://i.ibb.co/N9Fqmxd/CDCmort.png
You can clearly see that deaths attributed to these codes in those age groups have been increasing since well before 2015, basically since the data became available.
"Earlier this century, the steady and robust decline in heart-disease deaths more than offset the rising number from drugs and suicide, Dr. Anderson said. Now, “those declines aren’t there anymore,” he said, and the drug and suicide deaths account for many years of life lost because they occur mostly in young to middle-aged adults.
While progress against deaths from heart disease has stalled, cancer deaths—the nation’s No. 2 killer—are continuing a steady decline that began in the 1990s, Dr. Anderson said. “That’s kind of our saving grace,” he said. “Without those declines, we’d see a much bigger drop in life expectancy.”
Drug-overdose deaths skyrocketed between 2015 and 2017, particularly for adults between ages 25 and 54. The main culprit was fentanyl and other synthetic opioids that became pervasive in illicit drug supplies in the U.S. around that time.
Deaths from synthetic opioids rose 45% in 2017, while the death rate from heroin, which had risen sharply after 2010, was flat."
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4499285/