Suicides among young people went down after a national hotline was launched in 2022, researchers said in a new paper.
Some 35,529 suicides took place among people aged 15 to 34 from July 2022 through December 2024, researchers based at institutions in Massachusetts said in the study.
That was down from the preceding years and below the expected number of 39,901, according to the paper, published on April 22 by the Journal of the American Medical Association.
“The 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline appears to be working,” Dr. Vishal Patel, a clinical fellow at Harvard Medical School and one of the paper’s authors, told The Epoch Times in an email.
The hotline was started during the Biden administration on July 16, 2022. It has taken more than 14.8 million calls and nearly 4 million texts since then.
People who dial 988 are connected with trained mental health counselors, who offer one-on-one support for mental health, suicide, and substance use-related problems, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).
The researchers behind the new paper utilized death certificate data from January 1999 through June 2022 to calculate the expected number of suicides in the following years. They then analyzed death certificates to see how many suicides were recorded after the hotline was introduced.
The drop of approximately 4,400 fewer suicides from the number expected cannot be directly attributed to the hotline. But Patel and co-authors utilized several methods to “pressure-test the finding,” including looking at England, where no national crisis line was introduced.
The states with the largest number of 988 calls also saw the highest reductions in suicides among young adults, and there was a much smaller decline in suicides among elderly adults, who use the hotline less.
“Taken together, those patterns make a coincidence explanation hard to sustain,” Patel said.
“The other thing worth keeping in mind is scale—roughly 50,000 Americans die by suicide each year, so 4,400 fewer deaths in young adults alone over 2.5 years is a substantial public health signal.”
The authors did not list any funding sources. One of the authors said conflicts of interest included fees from various entities, including Doubleday Books, outside the study.
A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services told The Epoch Times via email that the department and SAMHSA “are committed to ensuring that all Americans have access to the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, which clearly provides life-saving support, helping millions of people every year.”
The department recently asked Congress to appropriate $534.6 million for the lifeline in the upcoming fiscal year, which is about the same amount as the current fiscal year.
