Following months of listening events and meetings in Washington, DC and across multiple Congressional districts, The Congressional Black Caucus’s Emergency Taskforce on Black Youth Suicide and Mental Health today released a report, “Ring the Alarm: the Crisis of Black Youth Suicide in America,” outlining the state of Black youth mental health and detailed policy recommendations for consideration by Congress. Chaired by Congresswoman Bonnie Watson Coleman, the task force was formed in April to explore the causes of and solutions to increasing rates of suicide among Black children. The report was assembled with the help of the task force’s working group, led by Dr. Michael Lindsey, PhD, MSW, MPH, Executive Director of the NYU McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy and Research.

Adding to what is known about the growing crisis of suicide among American teens, a team led by researchers at the McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy and Research at New York University have uncovered several troubling trends during the period of 1991-2017, among Black high school students, in particular. Their findings were published in the November 2019 issue of Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.