25 years of US adolescent mental-health deaths

CDC records for ages 15–24 from 1999 to 2023, tracking how mental illness figured into young Americans' deaths.

How has mental illness figured into young Americans’ deaths over the past quarter century? This study took the long view, analyzing CDC records of deaths among U.S. adolescents and young adults aged 15–24 from 1999 to 2023 where a mental or behavioral disorder was listed as a contributing cause. Over those 25 years, 67,984 such deaths were recorded, about 6.4 per 100,000 young people. The trend wasn’t a simple straight line up: researchers identified two distinct periods of increase (1999–2006 and 2009–2021), while the overall long-run trend was relatively stable. What stands out most are the disparities. Young men and those aged 20–24 died at higher rates than young women and 15–19-year-olds. American Indian and Alaska Native youth carried the heaviest burden of any racial or ethnic group, and deaths clustered geographically, with the highest rates in the South. The authors frame this less as a single alarm and more as a map of where help is failing to reach: persistent and emerging gaps that call for targeted, equity-focused prevention and better access to mental health and substance-use care for the young people and communities most affected.