World Suicide Prevention Day 2025: U.S. Suicide Trend Update through 2024
Also, some comparisons and link to others' posts
Today, September 10, 2025, is World Suicide Prevention Day.
Recently, there was the creation of a new emergency number for suicide help: 988
Here is the website: 988 Lifeline
My specialty isn’t preventing suicide, but noting the trends, so that’s this post.
Other People’s Posts
However, I do read other people’s posts, so I will link to two:
Rachel E. Moss: On World Suicide Prevention Day 2025
53 months ago today my husband of seven years (and partner of 14) stepped out into an early spring morning, walked into our garage, and sometime thereafter took his own life.
Every September thereafter I have felt sharply aware of World Suicide Prevention Day, which was set up in 2003 with the World Health Organisation as a major day of advocacy. You’ll probably hear a lot of statistics today, like there is a suicide every 40 seconds (over 700,000 per day). It’s likely that you’ll read those statistics, feel momentarily shocked, and then if you haven’t lost someone to suicide yourself, you’ll probably forget those stats until next year where you will be briefly shocked again.
That isn’t meant to be negative or critical. At the moment so many bad things are happening in the world that you can’t possibly hold all of them in your mind! But for those of us who are bereaved by suicide, this day can raise the painful question that is never far away: could I have prevented it?
Richard V. Reeves’s Substack, Of Boys and Men, focuses on many issues where males in U.S. society are suffering. Suicide is definitely one of the results that can be seen.
I will be writing more about the sex gap in suicide when Movember rolls around (aka my annual fundraising for men’s health issues in November), but not today, per se.
I will be updating my own trend issues.
For the record, suicide rates for both males and females in the U.S. have been increasing, so I’m not going to do the sex split in this post. I will save that for November.
Suicide Death Rates, 1968-2024
High-Level Rates
The crude death rate is starker in its increase from the low point in 2000, but whether you use the crude rate or the age-adjusted death rate, suicide death rates have climbed over 35% cumulatively since their low point.
Rates by Age Groups
Youth: Under Age 25
When we break out suicide death rates by age groups, we need to be careful in looking at the vertical scales.
So keep in mind that suicide is often either #2 or #3 as a top-ranked cause of death for these ages (after accidents). Sometimes homicide outranks it.
Working Age: Age 25-64
Keep in mind that the graph for youth maxes out at a rate of around 20 per 100,000 people per year (which happened in 2021).
In this graph, the rates are hovering below 20, after a run-up after 2000.
Seniors: Age 65+
Again, remember the scale.
Interestingly, the rate generally drops after age 64, for the age 65-74 group, and then starts growing again.
The age group with the highest death rate due to suicide is the oldest age group, in the U.S.
Spreadsheets
International Trends
Our World in Data has more data by country, though some of their point is that mortality data by cause of death isn’t that good for many poorer country. This is not unique to suicide.
I deliberately picked specific countries. While many European countries have decreasing suicide death rates, some countries, such as South Korea and Lesotho, have high and increasing suicide rates.
We can look at youth suicides by country…
Some of these, such as the spike in Japan in the the early post-WWII period, can make sense — and that is a very high rate.
I’m not sure what was happening in France and Canada… it can be that there was high youth unemployment that peaked in 1980 in those countries (while doing well in the U.S.) Again, be sure to notice that these are different scales.
The high volatility in the Korean rates is very interesting.
Related Posts
Nov 2024: Movember 2024: Veterans and Suicide
Nov 2022: Read the News with Meep: On Suicide Trends by Race (and Sex) in 2021 (and Earlier) — also explains how I think through reading through the news
Nov 2022: Movember 2022: The Sex Gap in Suicide
Sep 2022: World Suicide Prevention Day: U.S. Suicide Trend Update through 2021
May 2022: U.S. Gun Deaths are Mostly Suicides, not Homicides
Jan 2022: Suicide: Trends, 1968-2020, and Provisional Counts Through June 2021
Nov 2021: Movember Fundraising: Men and Suicide
Jul 2017: Mortality Monday: Suicide — Rates