Unraveling the Riddle of Suicide Risk

For the past four years, much of the conversation around mental health and suicide has centered around the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. But U.S. suicide rates have actually been climbing for over two decades — rising by more than 35% between 2000 and 2021, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). As of 2021, suicide was the second most common cause of death among 10–24-year-olds.

Dr. Yunyu Xiao is pushing to identify strategies that could help reverse these alarming trends. She and her colleagues are leveraging a combination of cutting-edge computational techniques and cross-disciplinary insights from biology, epidemiology, economics and public health to better understand the factors that drive suicidal behavior — and the systemic disparities that put some people at greatest risk. “Even though it’s a huge cause of death... we know amazingly little about why people die by suicide,” says Dr. J. John Mann, the Paul Janssen Professor of Translational Neuroscience (in Psychiatry and in Radiology) at Columbia University and close collaborator with Dr. Xiao.