Our estimate is higher than previous reports for several reasons. First, our adjustment for underreporting substantially increased the estimated numbers of suicides, thereby raising the economic cost by 59.8% compared with the estimate based only on officially reported suicides. Second, our estimates are more recent. Population, health expenditures per capita, GDP per capita, and numbers of suicides have increased (Adams, 2011). For example, from 2000 to 2013, the numbers of deaths by suicide increased from 29,416 to 41,149. The rise outstripped population growth, with a rise in the suicide rate from 11 to 13 per 100,000 population (CDC, 2015a; Corso et al., 2007). Third, our data sources have generated higher average values of earnings due to a difference in data sources. As noted, our estimates of earnings were based on Corso et al. (2007), which used as the average monetary earnings of the entire U.S. population by decade of age as reported in tables PINC‐01, PINC‐04, and PINC‐05 of Current Population Survey (U.S. Census Bureau, 2015). On the other hand, based on the background document (Lawrence et al., 2014), the
