Behind the alarming rise in US gun suicides among youth of color

Moments before he took his life, Bunch texted his parents that he loved them.

Trina Bunch, 46, described her son as an outgoing teen who had no known mental health issues. A talented baseball and basketball player, he dreamed of attending Howard University and developing video games.

Firearm suicides account for nearly half of suicide deaths among children and adolescents, and suicide risk is more than four times higher in households with firearms. About 30 million children under 18 live in homes with at least one firearm, and 5 million live in homes where at least one firearm is both loaded and unlocked.

From 2019 to 2021, the overall suicide rate among white people stayed roughly the same but increased 17% among Black people and 11% among the youth, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. These are two demographics that historically have had lower suicide risk, Nestadt said. During the same period, suicide deaths by every method other than firearms, including overdose and suffocation, dropped by 8%.

Means reduction remains the most effective suicide prevention strategy, Nestadt said. In post-war Britain, for example, domestic carbon monoxide poisoning was the leading method of suicide. In the 1960s, after the country replaced coal gas with natural gas ovens, suicides fell rapidly. At the turn of the century, a reduction in the size of painkiller packages led to a 22% decrease in suicide deaths from paracetamol and aspirin.

One important step to Black youth suicide prevention is lowering financial barriers to mental health services, and connecting at-risk adolescents to Black therapists who understand their personal experiences and struggles, Cubbage said. (The vast majority of practicing US psychologists are white: only 3% are Black, 4% are Asian, and 7% are Latino, according to the American Psychological Foundation.)

Joel Wong, a psychology professor at Indiana University Bloomington who studies suicides in the Asian American community, said the group has historically experienced relatively low rates of gun violence and gun suicides because few Asian countries have a strong culture of gun ownership. (Research shows that means not involving firearms were, and remain, the most common method of suicide among Asian Americans.) But the trend is changing with the younger generation, he said.