Many People Who Die by Suicide Are Not Depressed, Research Shows

Tens of thousands of Americans commit suicide each year at a rate of one death every 11 minutes. Among wealthy nations, the United States has one of the highest suicide rates in the world. Perhaps most disturbingly, suicide rates have been mostly rising for two decades.

Suicide prevention efforts in the United States have typically focused on addressing mental health concerns. Connecting people with medication, therapy, and crisis support, including through 988, the national crisis hotline launched in 2022, are among the most common approaches. But while experts agree that mental health is certainly a factor in suicide, in recent decades experts have looked more closely at external factors. For many, the pandemic was a galvanizing event. The rate of depression and anxiety rose not because everyone suddenly developed a mental health condition, but because the world changed.

No Risk Factors

A 2025 study from the University of Utah provides additional evidence that suicide does not always stem from mental health issues. Half of individuals who die by suicide have no history of risk factors, yet conventional wisdom has long assumed that these people simply weren’t sufficiently screened for depression and other psychiatric conditions.

Looking at genetic data, a team led by Hillary Coon, PhD, found that these individuals actually had few risk factors for suicide-linked psychiatric conditions like major depressive disorder, Alzheimer’s disease, and PTSD, or even milder conditions like depressed mood and neuroticism. Coon, who next plans to study other factors to determine why people kill themselves, emphasizes that environmental and social conditions play a role.

Chris Pawelski knows this all too well. In 2020, the upstate New York farmer was overwhelmed with everything that life was throwing at him. His father, whom he had worked side-by-side for decades, had died of renal cancer. Pawelski’s mother had dementia, and his father’s death left him as her primary caregiver.

Dire Straits

Meanwhile, his family’s onion farm was in dire straits. Despite Pawelski working seven days a week to keep it afloat, it was hemorrhaging money. Over the 2020 season alone, it lost a few hundred thousand dollars.

With debts piling up and his marriage increasingly strained, Pawelski began contemplating suicide. “It’s all stuff collapsing down upon you,” he said. “It’s weeks, months, years of dealing with all sorts of pressures that you can’t alleviate.”

Unfortunately for him, the support offered through therapy and crisis hotline was not enough. That’s “a band-aid on a gunshot wound,” he said.

Pawelski was not alone in experiencing financial strain that led him to consider suicide. According to the CDC, people with lower income levels may be at a higher risk for suicide. Local economic conditions—and not just personal hardship— are also tied to suicide risk. Among American Indian/Alaska Native people, for instance, the suicide risk in the lowest-income counties is double that of those in the highest-income counties.

Social Conditions

In addition to money-related concerns, social conditions play a role. The rate of health insurance coverage and home Internet access in a given county affects suicide rates by as much as 44 percent, according to the CDC.

Experts emphasize that suicide-prevention efforts need to take into account these various circumstances. So far, however, the United States has lacked the will to enact a more comprehensive approach. With elected officials only having a few years to prove their worth to voters, short-term achievements like increasing the number of people who receive therapy take precedence over long-term solutions like ensuring the availability of jobs, health care, food stamps, and livable wages.

Alarmingly, as experts call for more funding tor these and other similar initiatives, the Trump administration has gone in the other direction, cutting funding for Medicaid and food stamps. With some of these reforms not going into effect until 2028, people who depend on Medicaid and food stamps may be facing a heightened risk of suicide in the years ahead.

Changes in federal programs can cause “extreme stress and anxiety” in people who need them, said Hannah Wesolowski, the chief advocacy officer for the National Alliance on Mental Illness. “When people feel desperate, that’s when crises can emerge.”

Crisis Point

Pawelski was at a crisis point when he decided with his wife that the couple could not afford to grow onions anymore. The decision, which meant his family’s legacy of onion farming would end with him, was “soul-crushing.”

In the midst of Pawelski losing weight and continuing to contemplate suicide, he and wife called NY FarmNet. The free program connected Pawelski with both a financial analyst and a social worker. Working with the financial analyst, Pawelski came up with a plan to transition from growing onions that he sold at wholesale to growing other vegetable that he would sell directly to local consumers. Meanwhile, the social worker helped Pawelski to accept his new reality.

The support was crucial. Pawelski has since stabilized his business, and he is noticeably in better spirits to the point that a neighbor pointed out the improvement. Pawelski now advocates for comprehensive programs that ensure fair prices for produce, provide debt relief for farmers, and connect rural families with much-needed broadband Internet. “We need to think broader and longer-term than a helpline,” he said.