Suicide Trends: U.S. Trends by Sex and Race/Ethnicity through 2022

Yes, 2022 was very bad

You may have seen the headlines:

NY Times: U.S. Suicide Deaths Rose in 2022, C.D.C. Estimates Say

The estimated number of suicide deaths in the United States rose to nearly 50,000 in 2022, according to provisional data released on Thursday from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The total would be an increase of approximately 2.6 percent since 2021.

The C.D.C. estimates the overall number of deaths to be 49,449 but has not yet calculated the suicide rates for 2022. Given that the U.S. population grew by about 0.4 percent in 2022, a 2.6 percent increase in deaths indicates that suicide rates are continuing to rise, although not universally among all groups.

Suicide deaths have fluctuated somewhat over the years and declined in 2019 and 2020. But the overall suicide rate, or the number of suicides per 100,000 people, has increased by about 35 percent over the last two decades. People 65 and older had the highest increase in the number of deaths by suicide in 2022 among the various age groups.

CDC WONDER did update last week, and I do have updated statistics. In this post, I will look at the high-level results with age-adjusted death rates (which are not very different from the crude rates), and I will also split it out by sex.

Long-term Trend, 1968-2022 (provisional)

First, let’s just start out with the longest-term trend I can get at:

The death rate due to suicide, whether measured by crude rate or age-adjusted rate, was the highest we’ve measured.

There are a variety of reasons for that, which we’ll see over multiple posts - you can see that, if anything, the pandemic gave a pause to the increasing suicide death trend in 2020. Before this peak in 2022, the prior peak had been in 2018.

Suicide trend by sex

For the remaining graphs, I will restrict the period covered to 1999-2022.

Part of the reason for restricting this is I covered the pre-1999 period in this post in January 2022. But also, I want to focus on these years of increasing death rates.

In my Movember fundraising posts, I’ve mentioned the sex gap in suicide.

There is a mortality gap for many causes of death, but it is pretty stark for suicide. The death rate for males for suicide is about 4 times that of females.

It is difficult to see this from the graph, because of the difference in scales, but the male death rate for suicide increased 31% from 1999 to 2022, which it increased 48% for females over the same period.

I will note the rate was higher for females in 2018 than in 2022.

But in general, the rates have been increasing for both males and females.

Suicide trend by race/ethnicity

Due to the large differences by sex, when looking to the trend by race/ethnicity, I am splitting this out by sex.

First, males:

In the NY Times article above, there was this bit:

The C.D.C. data also included positive developments: The number of suicide deaths fell by around 8 percent among people 10-24 years old and by about 6 percent for American Indian and Alaska Native people.

They don’t mention it here: suicide deaths for youngsters are actually low rate… and, well, you can see that the American Indian and Alaska Native peoples’ suicide death rate dropped from the highest of all the groups they have there.

Indeed, when I look across all sorts of “deaths of despair”, the American Indian and Alaska Native peoples, both males and females, have been very high, and this is hideous. The rate for AIAN males increased by 100% from 1999 to 2022, when they started out at the same level as non-Hispanic white males.

Here is the graph for females:

First, note how different the vertical scales are on these two graphs.

But you can see AIAN females have a 2022 rate about the same level as non-Hispanic black males. Their rate increased by over 200% from 1999. Also, their rate increased in 2022.

Overall, suicide death rates have been increasing for the whole U.S. population for two decades. The 2022 experience is not really reversing any of that.

In future posts, I’ll look at the age and sex groups, as well as geographic differences.