Suicides by Age
Notes: Data include suicide deaths that occurred in Rhode Island among Rhode Island residents. In compliance with RIDOH’s Small Number Reporting Policy, counts of less than five are not shown. Any use of counts to calculate rates and proportions is subject to RIDOH’s Small Number Reporting Policy available at health.ri.gov/publications/policies/smallnumbersreporting.pdf
Discussion
This bar chart shows the age of people who die by suicide compared to how many people are in that age group. You can see that, for example, while 33% of Rhode Islanders are younger than 25, this group accounted for 9% of suicide deaths between 2016-2020. However, while 55-64-year-olds were only 12% of the population, they accounted for 22% of suicides in that time period. This is in line with national data that show middle-aged people to be the group that most often dies by suicide. In general, younger age groups and people older than age 85 are the groups that least often die by suicide.
It’s helpful to understand what some of the data terms mean. Here is information about percentages:
Percentages tell us how many people have died by suicide compared to the whole group of people. For instance, when we look at the percentages of people who have died by age, the graph shows us out of all the suicide deaths in the state, how many deaths were among people younger than age 25 and people ages 65 and older.