Between 2018 and 2021, the suicide rate among Black Americans ages 10 to 24 climbed from 8.2 per 100,000 to 11.2 per 100,000. That is a 36.6 percent increase in three years, the steepest of any racial or ethnic group in that window, documented by the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report and pulled from death-certificate records in CDC WONDER. The follow-up MMWR analysis covering 2018 to 2023 confirms the trajectory did not reverse: rates for Black persons in that age band were still climbing, up 29.4 percent across the full period.
The Congressional Black Caucus saw this coming. In April 2019, Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman convened the Emergency Taskforce on Black Youth Suicide and Mental Health. Eight months later, in December 2019, the task force published Ring the Alarm: The Crisis of Black Youth Suicide in America, led by Dr. Michael A. Lindsey of NYU's McSilver Institute. The report named a pattern researchers had been quietly tracking since the early 2000s: while suicide rates among white youth were ticking up, rates among Black youth were rising faster, and among Black children under 13, the rate was already higher than among white peers of the same age.
Seven years on, the alarm has rung. The question is what people did about it, and what worked.
Most of what happened after Ring the Alarm was activity. Foundation statements. University task forces with no budget. Awareness campaigns that asked young Black men to "start the conversation" without funding anyone to be on the other end of that conversation. None of that moves a death rate. What does move it is workforce capacity, culturally specific clinical training, and infrastructure that meets people where they already are. A handful of efforts are doing that work seriously enough to track, and they share a common pattern: federal money, an institutional home, and accountability to the population they serve.
The clearest example is the African American Behavioral Health Center of Excellence at Morehouse School of Medicine, established by SAMHSA on October 1, 2020 and housed in Morehouse's National Center for Primary Care in Atlanta. The center's mandate is not direct service. It is workforce. It trains the clinicians, school counselors, faith-based responders, and community health workers who serve Black populations, in evidence-based practices that account for racism as a clinical variable rather than a footnote. Through partnership with the American Psychiatric Association, the center delivers the Striving for Excellence series, twelve free webinars plus two self-paced modules, focused on disparities in patient care. Providers can register at no cost. Black-led behavioral health organizations can request technical assistance. For a reader looking for the institutional anchor of the federal response, this is it: africanamericanbehavioralhealth.org.
The second piece of infrastructure that's holding is Cities United. Founded in 2011 in partnership between Casey Family Programs, the National League of Cities, and the Campaign for Black Male Achievement, Cities United now works with 130 partner cities to reduce homicide and suicide among young Black men and boys. The model is municipal: mayors sign on, cities build a public safety plan that integrates mental health response, community violence intervention, and youth programming, and the network shares what's measurably reducing harm. The reframing matters. Suicide and community violence among young Black men are not separate epidemics. They are linked by the same upstream conditions, exposure to violence, untreated trauma, economic precarity, and a clinical system that has historically misdiagnosed Black men or refused to see them at all. Cities United's Roadmap to Safe, Healthy, and Hopeful Communities treats them as one problem with shared solutions. The network's partner-cities list is at citiesunited.org/our-network. If your city is on it, there is already a designated city lead doing this work, and there is a way in.
The third piece is 988. When the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline transitioned to the three-digit 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline in July 2022, one of the operational questions was whether it would be useful for Black callers specifically, who have historically been routed through systems that defaulted to police response. 988 is not perfect on that question, and any honest read has to acknowledge the open debate about when 988 calls escalate to law enforcement. But 988's Black Mental Health resource page at 988lifeline.org/help-yourself/black-mental-health is real, it lists nine Black-led mental health organizations including the Boris Lawrence Henson Foundation, BEAM, the Loveland Foundation, the Black Mental Health Alliance, Therapy for Black Girls, the Steve Fund, and the National Organization for People of Color Against Suicide, and counselors can route callers to follow-up services. Calling 988 connects you to a crisis counselor immediately, by phone, text, or chat, around the clock, in English or Spanish, with translation in over 240 languages. It is free and confidential.
The fourth piece is harder to point to but matters: Black-led therapist directories that put choice back in the caller's hands. The Boris Lawrence Henson Foundation, founded by Taraji P. Henson in 2018 in memory of her father, who returned from Vietnam with untreated combat trauma, operates a Resource Guide at resourceguide.borislhensonfoundation.org that lets you search by location, insurance, identity, and modality. It is free to use. The foundation has also subsidized therapy sessions directly through its Mental Wellness Support Programs for community members who cannot afford care. NAMI's Sharing Hope: Mental Wellness in the Black and African Ancestry Communities is a three-part community conversation curriculum, with facilitator guides and videos, designed to be run in churches, barbershops, fraternity meetings, and community centers. It is free, and it is doing the cultural translation work that clinical settings often fail at.
What is not working, and is worth naming, is the unfunded school-based screening push. Multiple states added universal mental health screening for middle and high schoolers after 2020, but most did so without expanding the clinical workforce on the receiving end. A positive screen with no clinician to refer to is a paperwork event, not an intervention. Ring the Alarm warned about exactly this in 2019, and the warning held. The percentage of Black adolescents who screen positive for depression has risen; the percentage who actually receive treatment after a positive screen has barely moved. That gap is the workforce problem. It is what the Morehouse Center of Excellence was built to address, and it is why throwing more screening into schools without funding more Black clinicians is a misallocation, not a response.
The other piece of weak evidence is the wellness-app layer. Subscription apps marketed to Black users have proliferated since 2020. Some are genuinely useful for people already stable and looking for skill-building. None has produced peer-reviewed evidence of reducing suicide attempts or completed suicide in young Black men. Treat them as supplements to clinical care, not substitutes.
If you are a parent, sibling, partner, or friend of a young Black man who is struggling right now, the operational sequence is this. Ask directly whether they have been thinking about suicide. Research consistently finds that asking does not plant the idea; it lowers the wall. If the answer is yes or you are unsure, stay with them and call or text 988 together. While they are on the line, search the BLHF Resource Guide or NAMI's local affiliate for a Black male clinician in your area, and book the first available appointment, even if it is two weeks out. Remove access to lethal means in the home; the evidence on this is unambiguous. Tell one other trusted adult so the load is not on one person. If they have a primary care doctor they trust, loop that doctor in, because integrated primary-care mental health is where most Black men first show up for help and it is where follow-through is most likely.
If you are a young Black man reading this for yourself, you are not the problem to be solved. The problem is a system that has been slow to build clinicians who look like you, slow to fund the institutions that train them, and slow to listen when researchers like Michael Lindsey rang the alarm in 2019. The infrastructure now exists, unevenly, and it is reachable. 988 by phone or text answers in under a minute on average. The BLHF directory will give you names. If you want to talk to someone who shares your cultural reference points before you ever set foot in a clinical office, NAMI Sharing Hope sessions are running in cities across the country and they are free. None of this requires insurance. None of it requires you to explain race to your clinician before you can talk about what is actually happening in your life.
The data is the data. Rates among young Black men climbed faster than any other group in the country across the last two CDC analytic windows. But the response is no longer hypothetical. It is the Morehouse center, the Cities United network, 988's Black mental health pathway, and the Black-led directories and community-conversation programs that filled in where federal infrastructure was slow. The work now is not awareness. It is access. The phone numbers and links above are how access begins.
If you or someone you know is in crisis: Call or text 988, or chat at 988lifeline.org. Free, confidential, 24/7. For Black-specific resources: 988lifeline.org/help-yourself/black-mental-health.
