domestic product (GDP) (World Bank, 2015a). This adjustment incorporated not only inflation, but also increases in earnings due to higher productivity. Third, we incorporated variability among states in per capita health care expenditures and income to reflect state‐to‐state differences in economic loss from a suicide. To adjust medical costs, we used per capita health expenditures, relative to the national average (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2015). To adjust indirect costs, we used average per capita GDP relative to the national average based on aggregate data (US Department of Commerce Bureau of Economic Analysis, 2015) and population by state (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2015). We then computed each state's cost based on its number of suicides by age times the adjusted medical and adjusted age‐specific indirect costs and combined the results to national averages of medical and indirect costs per suicide. Fourth, we adjusted the resulting 2007 medical and indirect costs per suicide to 2013 based on national trends in the previously used indicators—GDP per capita (World Bank, 2015a) and health expenditures per capita (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, 2015). Fifth, we computed aggregate 2013 costs of reported suicides by multiplying the numbers of suicides by age and gender times the respective adjusted
