Fact check: Florida youth suicide rate

I came across an odd side-note in Michael Gannon's Short History of Florida (1992, updated 2003) on pages 147-8 which reads: "Civic and religious spokespersons began talking in earnest about the need to protect, nurture, and guide Florida's young, all the more so when it became known that the state had the nation's highest youth suicide rate."

Gannon provides no reference for this statement, but I happen to know the CDC publishes detailed mortality statistics for every state in the nation all the way back to 1968. Their "Wonder" online database application allows you to break down these data by age group and use them to rank the states. Of course Florida never had the highest rate for youths ages 15-24 (that distinction belongs principally to Alaska) but I assume Gannon meant Florida was highest among the 20 most populous states.

By that measure Florida indeed was #1 in the years 1980 and 81, but those were the only two years I could find that true. Florida ranked #2 in 1969, 75, 84, and 96. It ranked #3 in 1970, 74, and 82. In the 90s we ranked mostly between 5-10th place, and in the 2000s we ranked mostly 10-15th place, as adjusted to the nearest census year.

Florida has an extraordinarily high suicide rate in the 55-and-up age group, however, ranking in the top 3 for every year I checked including 2010, the most recent year for which data were available. With 1,151 suicides we were second only to California in number of deaths, and second only to Arizona (371 deaths) in terms of crude rate per 100,000 in population.

That aside, the point Gannon seemed to be making is that Florida didn't take very good care of its kids in the late 20th century, which can be confirmed through other measures like the Annie E. Casey Foundation's "Kids Count" Data Book, published since 1989, which ranks the states based on a variety of measures of child well-being. Florida spent many years in the bottom 5 of that last list, but has since climbed up to the mid-30s, on a scale from 50 to 1 where 50 is the worst (New Mexico) and 1 is the best (New Hampshire). For the complete 2013 list see page 16 of this PDF file: http://www.aecf.org/~/media/Pubs/Initiatives/KIDS%20COUNT/123/2013KIDSCOUNTDataBook/2013KIDSCOUNTDataBookr.pdf