By Marcus Hart
I’m going to open this column with a number, and I want you to sit with it before you read past it: between 2014 and 2024, the suicide death rate among Black Americans climbed 53%. That’s more than ten times faster than the rate among white Americans over the same period, and roughly double the pace of increase among Latino and Native American communities. Inside that number is an even sharper one — Black boys and young men between 16 and 29 are now dying by suicide at a rate higher than their white peers, even though, across every age group combined, white men still die by suicide at nearly twice the rate of Black men. The crisis is concentrated. It’s getting worse. And it’s landing hardest on the youngest men in our community, with the death rate for Black men 20 to 24 sitting at 31.9 per 100,000 — the highest of any age bracket.
I’ve written about mental health in this column more times than I can count, and I’ve never opened with numbers this stark, because I don’t think we’ve earned the right to look away from them anymore.
Why This Number Doesn’t Match the Story We Tell Ourselves
There’s a narrative — I grew up inside it, most of you reading this did too — that Black men don’t struggle with suicidal thinking the way other groups do. That we’re “built different,” that our burden is survival and resilience, not despair. I understand where that narrative comes from. It comes from generations of men who had no other option but to keep moving, because stopping wasn’t survivable either. But a narrative built for survival in one era can quietly become a trap in the next one, and I think that’s exactly what’s happened here. The story that Black men don’t struggle with this became a reason not to ask, not to screen, not to fund culturally specific outreach at the scale the actual numbers demand. The result is a crisis that grew for a decade largely outside of public conversation, inside a community that told itself it was somewhere else.
I want to be precise about what I’m not saying. I’m not saying Black men are now “worse off” than other groups in an absolute sense — white men still die by suicide at higher absolute rates across the full population. What I’m saying is that the direction of change matters as much as the current level, and the direction here, especially among young Black men, is alarming and accelerating in a way that deserves the kind of urgent, resourced attention that gets applied when a crisis hits any other demographic this hard.
The Veteran Layer
For those of you who came to this column through my own story — combat veteran turned journalist — this next part is personal, not academic. VA research has found that roughly 22% of Black veterans who deployed screened positive for PTSD, compared to 14.1% of white veterans. That’s not a small gap. That’s a meaningfully different experience of the same wars, the same deployments, the same trauma exposure, filtered through a healthcare and cultural landscape that responds differently depending on who’s sitting in the chair.
I’ve talked to enough brothers who served to know part of what’s driving that gap isn’t just access — it’s trust. It’s whether the provider on the other side of the table has any real frame of reference for what a Black veteran’s return to civilian life actually looks like: the layered stress of combat trauma stacked on top of the everyday stress of navigating this country as a Black man, neither one canceling the other out, both compounding. Culturally informed care isn’t a nice-to-have add-on to veteran mental health treatment. For a lot of the men I served with, it’s the difference between walking into a VA office and walking back out the door and never going back.
What Actually Moves the Needle — Because This Column Doesn’t End Without One
I don’t write about a problem in this space without trying to point toward something practical, so here’s where I land after sitting with these numbers.
First, screening has to move into spaces Black men already trust — barbershops, churches, veteran service organizations, community centers — rather than waiting for men to walk unprompted into a clinical setting that a lot of us were never culturally conditioned to see as a first option. Programs that have done this, embedding trained counselors or peer specialists into barbershops and faith communities, consistently report higher engagement than clinic-first models, because they meet men where the conversation is already happening informally anyway.
Second, faith has to be treated as a genuine resource in this fight, not a substitute for clinical care and not something secular mental health advocates roll their eyes at. For a huge share of the men most at risk, a pastor or a men’s ministry leader is the first and sometimes only person they’ll admit real struggle to. The goal isn’t choosing between faith and therapy. It’s building the bridge between them — pastors trained to recognize warning signs and refer out, therapists who understand that a man’s faith isn’t an obstacle to treatment but frequently the very thing keeping him alive long enough to get to treatment.
Third, and I’ll say this plainly because it needs saying: if you are a Black man reading this column and something in these numbers landed close to home, that is not weakness, and it is not a story you have to carry by yourself because “that’s not what we do.” Asking for help is one of the most disciplined, veteran-aware, survival-minded things a man can do. I’d rather write an uncomfortable column that gets one more brother to make a call than a comfortable one that lets all of us keep looking away.
If you or someone you love is struggling, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available by call or text, 24 hours a day. That number exists because somebody decided the conversation was worth having out loud. Consider this column me doing the same.