Suicide Patterns Repeat Over Decades, but the Crisis Grows Among Youth

While suicide levels have been declining overall in the United States since 1900, new research shows there is a sharp and persistent rise in suicides among individuals under the age of 35.

“We can observe them, but we have been mystified by suicide trends over decades,” said Bernice Pescosolido, one of the study co-authors and director of the Irsay Institute for Sociomedical Research at Indiana University. “But this study and this new dataset are opening up new ideas that we really need to think about.”

Annotated US crude suicide rates, 1900–2021.

This study (A century of suicide: insights from long-term data in the United States), published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) offers a groundbreaking look at 122 years of suicide data in the United States, revealing that the nature of the crisis of suicide has fundamentally shifted over the last century.

Researchers connected data from multiple public sources from 1900 to 2021 to create the Suicide Trends and Archival Comparative Knowledgebase (STACK). Using this, they found that while overall suicide rates have historically followed a cyclical, downward-trending pattern, there is a troubling increase in suicides among individuals under age 35. This “youth crisis” began much earlier than previously recognized, tracing back to the mid-to-late 1950s, with each successive generation facing increased risk at progressively younger ages.

Researchers found that factors like older age and living in large metropolitan areas have recently emerged as protective factors to suicide risk, contrary to historical trends. The study also documents a startling increase in suicides by hanging since the 1980s across both males and females.

Further, the study found that taking a long view of suicide death shows that there are moments of acute social crisis associated with high rates of death that create oscillating patterns (see figure) such as growing industrialization in the early 1910s, the Great Depression in the 1930s, and the women's rights movement of the 1970s.

By identifying critical inflection points relating to major social change where trends in suicide shifted, the authors suggest that suicide should be viewed as a collective social phenomenon rather than just a collection of individual tragedies. The researchers estimate that if the U.S. had consistently maintained its lowest observed age-specific suicide rates, more than 372,000 deaths could have been prevented between 1969 and 2021 alone.

Updated on April 29 to include links to further coverage of this story.