Suicide Rate 

WHY IT MATTERS: Suicide is among the most devastating losses a family can experience and an essential indicator of American mental health and well-being. 

SUMMARY: Tragically, the United States suicide rate has climbed approximately 31% over the past two decades, reaching near historic highs. This sustained rise masks sharp geographic disparities with rates in the rural Mountain West running several times higher than in the urban Northeast.  This data points to a persistent national mental-health challenge shaped by cultural, economic, and policy-factors. 

FINDINGS 

Young Americans Are Especially Vulnerable to Suicide 

• Suicide is the second leading cause of death for young people; a 2024 CDC report found that nearly 1 in every 10 high school students made a suicide attempt in the prior year. 

Figure 1 shows the U.S. suicide rate climbing steadily from 10.8 per 100,000 in 2003 to a peak of 14.2 in 2018, declined slightly in the following two years, then returning to 14.2 in 2022 and 14.1 in 2023—a roughly 30% increase over two decades. 

Suicide Is a Cultural, Geographic, and Policy Problem 

• Suicide rates are widely dispersed across the 50 states, reflecting underlying shifts across many factors including cultural norms, community organizations, and state and federal prevention policies as well as the wide variety of state culture, geography, and economics. 

• Suicide rates are consistently higher in rural areas than urban ones, with the disparity most pronounced in the Mountain West; since 2000, rural suicide rates have risen 46% compared to 27% in urban areas. 

Figure 2 shows suicide rates vary widely across states. Alaska had the highest rate at 28.2 suicides per 100,000 people followed by Montana (26.6), Wyoming (26.3), Idaho (23.3), and New Mexico (22.8). The District of Columbia had the lowest at 5.8, with New Jersey (7.2), New York (8.3), Massachusetts (8.6), and Connecticut (9.1) also among the lowest. 

Expanding Access to Mental Health Care Can Reduce Suicides 

• Expanding prescriptive authority for specially trained psychologists is a low-cost way to widen access to mental-health care in rural underserved areas—rural America has nearly three times as many clinical psychologists as psychiatrists per capita, and removing licensing barriers increases the supply of qualified prescribers without new public spending. 

• Seven states—New Mexico, Louisiana, Illinois, Iowa, Idaho, Colorado, and Utah—have already reformed licensure laws to allow psychologists to prescribe medication. Research using New Mexico and Louisiana as natural experiments has linked these reforms to reduced suicides and lower mental-illness mortality. Though the findings are still emerging, they suggest prescriptive authority is a low-cost reform worth trying and is one that widens access to care and has already shown real promise where adopted. 

How the Suicide Rate is Measured 

The suicide rate is calculated as the total number of deaths by suicide per 100,000 people. 

BOTTOMLINE 

America’s suicide rate has stayed near historic highs for nearly a decade, with the heaviest toll falling on rural and underserved communities where mental-health care is hardest to reach. Closing that gap, through state-level reforms that put more prescribers where they’re needed most, offers a concrete path toward reversing a crisis that has resisted progress for twenty years.