Special Issue on Black Youth Suicide and Beyond

Abstract

I became concerned about Black suicide after I started working in the mental health field, first as a counselor in training at a community mental health center, then as a crisis counselor at a local hospital, and later as a psychologist at a university counseling center. As distressing as it is to work with adult clients who have given up on life, it is even more distressing to hear children, as young as 3 and 5 years old to report feelings of depression and suicidal intentions. Prior to the mid-2000s, the prevalent concern about suicide was not about youth’s suicide or about Black youth suicide, but the focus was on young adults. But the trend has changed and the reason for this special issue. What has sparked this focus on Black youth suicide? Data. Historically, Black populations have had lower levels of death by suicide compared to other ethnic groups (Gibbs, 1997). This pattern has been considered a paradox: A low rate of suicide in Black population despite the persistence of racial discrimination and oppression since the beginning of slavery. However, this trend changed. Since 2017, suicide became the third leading cause of death for Black male youth, aged 1–19, just behind homicide and unintentional injury (motor vehicle crashes, falls, fires, burns, drownings, poisonings; Centers for Disease Control & Prevention [CDC], 2017). This was the first time since documenting these statistics that rates of suicide among children 13 years or younger were almost two times higher for Black children than White children (Bridge et al., 2018). Over the past 20 years Black suicide rate youth in the 10-19 age range has increased (about 60%) faster than other racial/ethnic groups (American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry [AACAP], 2022)