Suicide now second leading cause of death among NCAA athletes
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Key takeaways:
- Suicide overtook cardiac events as second to accidents in terms of causes of death for NCAA athletes.
- The rate was highest among male cross-country athletes.
Suicide is now the second most common cause of death among college athletes in the United States, surpassed only by accidents, according to findings published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.
“Athletes are generally thought of as one of the healthiest populations in our society, yet the pressures of school, internal and external performance expectations, time demands, injury, athletic identity and physical fatigue can lead to depression, mental health problems and suicide,” the authors wrote.
According to one of the authors, the group’s work deals largely with sports medicine, and injury and illness are “a big part of our focus.”
“We’d witnessed what seemed like more reports of suicide in athletes and wanted to know if it was truly more incidents, or if more were just being reported,” Bridget Whelan, MPH, a sports medicine research scientist in the department of family medicine at the University of Washington, told Healio.
Whelan and colleagues studied a database of deaths kept by the National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA), which includes all deaths from any causes, to assess total deaths and death by suicide among NCAA athletes at Division I, II and III institutions. They identified athlete deaths from all causes using the NCAA Resolutions List, the Parent Heart Watch Database and prospective media searches, NCAA insurance claims and the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury database.
The researchers identified 1,102 deaths among college athletes from 2002 to 2022, with 77% being males. Their average age was 20 years but ranged from 17 to 24 years. More than 11% of the athletes took their own lives.
The authors noted that the yearly incidence rate of suicide for males increased throughout the study period (5-year incidence rate ratio = 1.32; 95% CI 1.14 to 1.53). For females, it increased from the 2010-2011 school year onward. This was in sharp contrast to the incidence rate of deaths due to causes such as accidents, cardiac events, homicide, cancer and heat stroke, which all fell between 2002 and 2022.
Overall, the proportion of suicide deaths doubled from the first 10 years (7.6%) to the second 10 years (15.3%), with suicide overtaking cardiac events to become the second most common cause of death, after accidents, among NCAA athletes.
“Unfortunately, our study shows that while the overall death rate stayed mostly stable over time, the rate of suicide amongst collegiate athletes has gone up,” Whelan said.
Wheland said they were surprised to see the rates increase how they did, especially as nonsuicide deaths decreased.
“Collegiate athletes are often thought to have protective factors like the sense of community with their team, support of coaches, trainers, doctors, and others,” Whelan said. “We were also surprised to find that male cross-country athletes had the highest rate, when previous literature — and what has been covered in the media — has seen higher rates in football.”
She said the results are likely related to the overall mental health crisis among young people, with one key difference.
“The difference is that some of these athletes are receiving more media attention than the average individual in this age group, and have high internal and external performance expectations, so some of that attention could be negatively affecting their mental health on a greater level,” Whelan said.
“This type of death is preventable,” she said. “Additional mental health resources including efforts to raise awareness, screening for early risk identification, training coaches and support staff on how to identify athletes at risk and providing access to mental health providers trained in sport psychology are examples of ways to help prevent suicide in this population.”
References:
Suicides among US college student athletes have doubled over past 20 years. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1039846?. Published Apr. 4, 2024. Accessed Apr. 5, 2024.
Whelan B, et al. Br J Sports Med. 2024;doi:10.1136/bjsports-2023-107509.
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