James Donaldson on Mental Health - 3 Things to Know About Substance Use and Suicide Mortality

Author: Nirmita Panchal In the past decade, nearly 1.8 million people in the United States lost their lives by suicide or alcohol and drug consumption.

Collectively, these deaths are sometimes referred to as “ deaths of despair ”, a term that emphasizes economic and social deterioration as driving factors.

However, additional and more complex factors may be linked to these deaths, such as health disparities, challenges with treatment access, reduced public services, and changes in drug supplies.

Therefore, the term “substance use and suicide deaths” is used throughout this brief as a composite measure describing deaths due to alcohol, drugs, and/or suicide.

These causes are examined together because they share many upstream risk factors and prevention strategies related to mental health and substance use.

This analysis explores trends in substance use and suicide mortality using data from CDC WONDER.

Due to overlap in several ICD-10 codes for deaths involving drugs, alcohol and/or suicide, duplicate codes were removed.

Therefore, total substance use and suicide deaths are not equivalent to the sum of alcohol-induced , suicide , and drug overdose deaths (see Methods for more information).

Key takeaways include: In 2024, substance use and suicide deaths (47.7 per 100,000 population) were the third leading cause of death in the U.S., behind heart disease (157.6) and cancer (139.4).

Deaths due to substance use and suicide increased over the past decade (34.6 in 2014) and peaked during the pandemic (59.6 in 2021).