Suicide rate for young women highest for 20 years as experts warn of mental health crisis

'They've got a lot more insecurity in their lives than their parents did'

Suicide among women in their early twenties is at its highest level in two decades, ONS figures show, as experts warn of a mental health crisis among young women who struggle with the pressures of modern life and social media.

While the overall figures for Great Britain show rates are at a seven-year low, women aged between 20 and 24 are increasingly likely to die by suicide.

Last year 106 deaths by suicide were recorded among this age group, the first time the number is been more than 100 since 1992, when it was 111. At 5.2 the rate per 100,000 women in this age group is the highest it has been since 1998, when it was 5.7.

Jenny Edwards CBE, chief executive of the Mental Health Foundation, called the figures "troubling".

"We know that particularly for young women their rate of poor mental health is three times that of their male contemporaries.

"Something is going on - social media use is one part but another is relationships between the sexes. They've got a lot more insecurity in their lives than their parents did.

"There's a tendency to blame ourselves if things aren't working out for us. Particularly if the message we're getting from social media is that everyone else is living fantastic lives, has got good holidays, and good jobs. That's a fairytale that can affect our overall mental health."

In recent years suicide prevention campaigns have focused on men, who still have a much higher rate than women in all age groups and are more than three times more likely to die by suicide than women. The most at-risk group is men in their early 40s, among whom the rate is 23.7.

Initiatives such as the Campaign Against Living Miserably have focused on encouraging men to open up about their feelings to try and bring down the suicide rate.

Charities said the campaigns appeared to be helping as the overall rate of men dying by suicide has dropped by three per cent from 2015 to 2016.

But they added that women could be facing many of the same problems.

Elizabeth Scowcroft, research manager for Samaritans, said: "A lot of the issues that women face are the same as men. Women might find it difficult to talk about their feelings as well.

"We shouldn't necessarily assume that men and women have completely different risk factors."

Professor Louis Appleby, of the University of Manchester, who leads the National Suicide Prevention Strategy for England, said the overall figures were the "best we've seen in years".

In England the overall rate fell from 10.1 to 9.5. "You'd have to go back more than three decades to find a drop as big as that in one year," he said.

However, he said that it was important to "keep an eye" on the figures for young people.

"There is a worry that we have a generation of young people who respond with self-harming behaviour to the stresses that they face," he said.

Last year an inquiry into mental health in England found that more than one in four women aged 16 to 24 had anxiety, depression, panic disorder, phobia or obsessive compulsive disorder, and one in five said they had self-harmed at some point in their life.

It concluded that young women had "become a key high risk group".

Professor Appleby said that it was "very easy to point to social media".

"There is good and bad in most of these social phenomena," he said, adding that many young people who struggled with their mental health found the internet a source of support and comfort.

In an examination of young suicide victims carried out by his department, one in four of the cases covered had used the internet in some way that was suicide-related, including posting about their plans on social media or researching methods.