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Content warning: This article contains references to suicide.

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is a hotline for individuals in crisis or for those looking to help someone else. To speak with a certified listener, call 1-800-273-8255. 

Crisis Text Line is a texting service for emotional crisis support. To speak with a trained listener, text HELLO to 741741. 

On-call counselors from Yale Mental Health and Counseling are available at any time: call (203) 432-0290. 

Additional resources are available in a guide compiled by the Yale College Council here.

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A recent report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, presented new data showing increasing national suicide rates over the past two decades.

On Sept. 26, the CDC published an update on suicide rates in the U.S. up to 2022, the most recent year of data collection, which also highlights changes in the national suicide rate since 2002. The News spoke with Yale professors about the trend and the suicide prevention studies conducted at the University.

Dr. Christine Cha, the inaugural core faculty member of the Yale Center for Brain and Mind Health, has made significant research advances in improving the assessment, prediction and reduction of suicide risk early in life. 

Cha said that the suicide rate trends “do not look encouraging, and at minimum suggest a lack of improvement in identifying and intervening on at-risk youth and adults.”

In 2022, suicide was the 11th leading cause of death. However, for those aged 10 to 14 and 20 to 34, suicide is the second leading cause of death, and for those aged 15 to 19, it’s the third leading cause. 

Increases in suicide rates

Preventing deaths by suicide is a public health priority in the United States, and effective efforts rely on high-quality data on its epidemiology.

Over the past two decades, the overall suicide rate has increased by 30 percent, from 10.9 deaths per 100,000 in 2002 to 14.2 deaths per 100,000 in 2022. 

 This trend is also observed by clinicians encountering patients presenting with self-harm on the ground. 

“My clinical experience is that we see kids who present with more acute symptoms than in the past: more depressed, more intense suicidal thinking, or actual attempts,” Dr. Yann Poncin, an associate professor at the Yale Child Study Center, wrote to the News. “Over just the last several months, there have been more youth suicides in Connecticut ages 10-19 than all of last year.” 

Suicide prevention has been increasingly prioritized as a public health issue. 

Dr. Michael Bloch MED ’04 GRD ’08, a professor in the Yale Child Study Center and the director and co-founder of the Pediatric Depression Clinic, studies new treatment strategies for adolescents at high suicide risk. 

“Suicide in youths remains a leading cause of death in the United States and has remained so for quite a long time,” Bloch noted. “This has been and remains a major public health problem.” 

The report shows that the male suicide rate was three to four times higher than the female suicide rate over the past two decades. It does not present information stratified by race and/or ethnicity or other demographic factors.

According to Cha, examining racial minority groups “that have displayed alarming increases in suicide death rates in recent years” is the next step. 

When asked how the information from the report can be used to improve prevention efforts, Bloch wrote to the News that “more political will and resources need to be devoted to suicide prevention and educational programs including means reduction (e.g. access to firearms).”

In 2022, firearms were the leading means of suicide, according to the CDC report.

However, there are challenges to means reduction that could make it difficult to implement strategies which curtail methods access.

“Actually discussing possible firearm removal—even if temporary—can be challenging for clinicians to navigate with patients and families,” Cha wrote. “Beyond that, there are legal considerations around transfer of firearms that we often perceive to go beyond the jurisdiction of healthcare.”

Suicide prevention study at Yale

Several groups at Yale focus on improving detection of suicide risk, identification of interventions and efficacy of clinical care.

As the first core faculty member of the Yale Center for Brain and Mind Health, Cha told the News that she aims to partner with colleagues across the University broadly to decrease youth suicide risks. 

“No one discipline holds the answer to something as multi-determined as suicide; this calls for a team science approach,” Cha wrote, emphasizing the collaborative nature of the efforts. 

Cha’s projects, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, dig into the psychology of suicidal youth. Early work shows that suicidal adolescents picture their future lives in more abstract terms, which can serve as both a marker that can be monitored over time as well as an intervention target. 

Cha’s lab also investigates patterns of parent-child disclosures of suicide risk and explores methodologies that are less reliant on self-report, such as reaction time, facial action and voice quality. 

Dr. Hilary Blumberg, director of Yale’s Mood Disorders Research Program, notes that the high suicide rates motivate the interdisciplinary research she and Yale collaborators are working on. Her research focuses on suicidal behaviour in adolescents’ brains and intervention.

Recent research, Blumberg wrote to the News, improved the understanding of the brain differences contributing to suicidal risks. It also showed that individuals can reduce suicide risks by learning to “regularize their sleep and other daily routines.”

Blumberg leads the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention study at Yale to implement a 12 week largely telehealth therapy within her BE-SMART, or Brain Emotion Circuitry Targeted Self-Monitoring and Regulation Therapy, program.

This therapy program aims to help participants learn skills and habits involved in emotion regulation.

“Even making modest improvements in the regularity of daily patterns of sleep, meal and physical activity times can be robust in improving mood and lowering suicide risk,” Blumberg wrote.

Other researchers such as Dr. Shirley Wang, an assistant professor in the department of psychology, are developing methods to personalize the care.

Wang’s Computational Clinical Science Lab develops machine-learning and mathematical models that study the dynamics of mental health in people’s daily lives and explain why people become suicidal. These models can inform the development of personalized, effective and scalable interventions, she said.

Psychiatrists Poncin and Dr. Pamela Hoffman joined the Zero Suicide initiative to improve screening of suicide risk in the clinical setting and reduce youth suicide deaths to zero.

“At the end of the day, how much should we aim to reduce suicide? To zero, because any life lost to suicide is not something we want to support,” Hoffman said. “Even though it seems like an impossible goal, to have any other goal would be insufficient.”

The rising suicide rates have led researchers to rethink prevention strategies.

A particular focus has been on diversifying the types of groups that are involved in suicide prevention.

“The consistently alarming trends invite a broader array of partners (e.g., in healthcare, education, government) to help address this complex yet preventable cause of death,” Cha wrote to the News. “There is a role we can all play in reducing these rates.” 

The 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available to call, text, or chat 24 hours a day, seven days a week.