261: Teen Depression & Suicide in 2026: What’s Different Now? with Jonathan Singer

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“Rina, I think a lot of people feel like they just don't know how to connect to their”

kid anymore.

I'm Rina 9 and welcome to ASLisa, the psychology of raising tweens and teens, and

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Just Google, ask Lisa podcast, we're here to help you untangle family life. Episode 261, teen depression and suicide in 2026, what's different now? With special guests, Dr. Jonathan Beasinger. You know, this is the part of the year where this Florida girl hates being up in New England.

The darkness, the, you know, daylight savings issue about getting darker earlier, and the cold, the cold Lisa. It is hard.

“I was called at the long dark tunnel of Cleveland, Winter, right?”

Like, you know, I can see the light, but it is a long dark tunnel.

There is no question, no question. Yeah. So, you know, I want to get right into our topic. You know, it is not just weather related on this one. It's a topic close to many parents' hearts and parents who might not be aware of it,

but have questions about it, because we don't talk publicly about this enough teen depression and suicide. I want to welcome our guests. Our listeners may actually remember our this guest from one of our earlier episodes, episode 71, what do parents need to know about suicide?

Dr. Jonathan B. Singer is one of the country's leading experts on you suicide prevention.

He's the past president of the American Association of Suicideology, a professor at Loyola

University, Chicago, and co-author the book, Suicide in schools. Jonathan actually joined us on the podcast in 2022. The landscape then looked very different so much as change in the past few years. So we're grateful to have him back to walk us through the state of adolescent mental health in 2026.

Jonathan, welcome. We are thrilled to have you here. Thank you so much. Rina, Lisa is an honor and a pleasure to be back on the podcast. All right, let's just get right down to it.

So you track these data very closely. You are on top of everything that's happening with adolescent depression and suicide. Since we saw you last, it's been four years. Or, yeah, it's been four years. What, what it's changed, what's better, what's worse, what should we know about the landscape

of things? The story is so interesting. So when we last talked in 2022, we were right in the throws of the pandemic. There were still questions about what was going to be the effect of the pandemic on suicide rates, on youth suicide, on depression and anxiety.

One of the things that we have learned because data takes a couple of years to work its way through local to state, to national and then into our hands. Is that in the beginning of the pandemic, there was a precipitous decline in youth suicide. So there's a lot of fear that rates were just going to skyrocket. They actually went down and then after that initial decrease, there was a bounce back.

And we saw right rates rise in 2021.

“They rose 2022, they rose and then we saw a decrease, which I think came as a surprise”

to a lot of folks because suicide rates hadn't decreased since 2007. But in 2023, they dropped precipitously by over one per 100,000 that might not sound like a lot, but it's a huge number. And the provisional data for 2024 is that the decline continues. Now these are overall national stats and lots of stories can be told about them, lots of

things that we could unpack with that. But overall youth suicide deaths have decreased in the United States in the last couple of years to the joy of many folks into the surprise of almost everyone. Wow. Wow.

So there are a lot of parents who assume there has to be some big stressor or event, some catastrophe that leads a child to suicide. Is that true? And what about the families that they're loving, they're wonderful, and they're caught

I think that for almost everyone, almost every parent, it is a surprise to hear that your

child might be thinking, maybe this is a world that doesn't want me in it. Maybe people would be better off if I weren't here. I mean, even saying those words is a little heartbreaking, as a result. We do so much as parents, but directly and indirectly, to make sure that our kids lives are the best that they can be.

What we know about things that contribute to youth suicide risk include this overwhelming sense that who you are is a problem, right? So maybe that you are a burden to a group of people that are important to you. So oftentimes this happens when you have a kid with gender identity, sexual orientation

“that pushes back against some sort of like family expectation or community norm, right?”

And they think, okay, by coming out, by being me, that is causing a problem for my family.

Again, different from who I am is a problem, very different, but who I am is causing a problem for my family. They don't know who I am, they're not using the right pronouns, they're not accepting my friends, this is a burden, this is a problem in my family and in my community. There are ways to buffer that, right, online communities can be helpful things like that.

But you have a kid who is struggling with the sense of maybe I am somehow a problem. Or you have a kid who is struggling to just be what their community thinks they should be generally, right? So you might have a kid that meets all of the norms, right? They do well in school, they're as successful in their athletics, they've got extra

curriculars, right, this sort of like ideal student. But keeping that up presents an enormous burden, and there's no space to not keep that up, right? So they don't feel like they can still be valued, but still be valued. Yeah.

100%. So lots of reasons why that could be the case. And so for parents, I think that there are a lot of different ways that we can think about supporting our kids, including supporting the many different ways that our kids don't quite meet expectations or match what we think they should be doing or how they

should be. Love them as they are.

“That's the best way of saying it, right?”

So we've seen national reports showing youth suicide deaths going down in their many communities who are still at this point experiencing really devastating loss, but this disconnect from local versus national can be so confusing. We often take national trends and think that's the way to go. How should families view these national trends?

Well, one of the challenges with national trends is that they don't tell the story of what is happening locally, and it could be that, for example, I said that nationally youth suicide rates are down, but we actually know that in many states youth suicide rates have not changed, right, at the state level and there are some states where the youth suicide rate has increased.

More locally or more granular, it doesn't matter if youth suicide rates have decreased. If even one kid in a school died by suicide, it doesn't matter. That one kid, that one event, is the thing that matters. And so what I would encourage parents to do is to number one, when you read headlines and it's saying something about like youth suicide is going up, youth suicides going

down.

Depression is going up, anxiety is going, all of those things know that they are almost always

talking about national trends, and if you're seeing something different in your community, that's fine. Just really focus on what's going on in your community. And if you're thinking, I wonder what's going on in my community, but I don't know. Then that's where you can turn to local officials, and you can say, hey, how are we tracking

this? How do we know what's going on?

“Are there trends that are similar to what I'm hearing in the news?”

They might be collecting data, but they don't have any way of reporting it out, right? So I live right outside of Chicago, and Evan's in Illinois, the city of Chicago, and

of issues.

Suicide deaths, crime, arrests, et cetera, et cetera, you can go on and you can look at it.

And if you're a researcher like me, sometimes you do that, but you don't have to be a researcher,

“you can do that, and then you get a sense of what's going on, even more granularly, I think”

it's important for parents to understand what's going on in their schools. Are the schools tracking how many kids are being identified at risk for something, right? How many kids are being assessed, how many kids are being referred, and that can give you a sense of what's going on hyper-locally with some of these issues around suicide risk and depression and things like that?

That's so interesting, right? Because that's really what you know, it's your neighborhood, it's your community that we're thinking about the most, of course. So getting to the question of prevention, we get we have some phenomenal questions from our listeners.

So one listener asked, does monitoring tech, social media, et cetera, help people know if their child might be suicidal? So you know, is social media digital technology a way to kind of keep an eye on this as a parent,

“and kind of related, like, what should parents be looking for?”

So if you can translate what kids are texting or communicating, then that's amazing because

oftentimes kids will communicate, assuming or presuming that some of this will be public at some point and they're trying to communicate private messages in public spaces. And so they will use language that we might not understand. So for example, TikTok popularized the term unalive, right? And it's another word for suicide.

You might hear somebody say something like, you know, my cousin unaliveed himself this weekend. And they do that because there are sensors on TikTok to say, if you say, my cousin killed himself or he died by suicide, that video will get taken down. And so kids have language that they use to get around those things.

So part of it is knowing how kids are talking about things.

Another piece is, again, you can use visuals, there are memes, things like that, but looking for trends is something that you could do. But I will say is that one of the things that we see in the research is that you will get kids who start to deactivate or disconnect from people, as they move towards a suicidal event.

And so if parents are thinking, well, I'm going to track their social media use, if they see that they've stopped using it, on one hand, the parents are like, this is great. They're not spending so much time on their phone. They're not blah blah blah, or that could be that they are disconnecting from peers. They are no longer participating in social activities, which, for adolescents, particularly

is developmentally central in a way that if you and I stop checking our phones so much, that's probably a little healthier. Probably a good thing, fascinating, that's fascinating. So I love this bright spot in the research. It can be so depressing and down, but this looks like college students and what we found was

a surprising trend that college students are actually doing better, lower rates of anxiety, depression, suicide, ideation.

“What's behind that improvement and what can other child age groups learn from this?”

So you're absolutely right, the data on college students is very encouraging. Also, if we think about the kids that were in the college students, the young adults, who are responding to these questions, some of these youth were in high school at the beginning of the pandemic, which was incredibly stressful. They started college, some of these older ones started college in their parents'

statements, right, or they weren't actually having the experience. So I think part of it is getting back into what college is, being able to take advantage of all the things, right, both the social sides, but also the academic sides, being able to be in groups, working in a lab, which you literally couldn't do for a year, you know. Kids are eating alone in their dorm rooms.

I mean, I mean, in some ways, like, of course the numbers were elevated. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So part of it is that a few years ago, things were really bad, and they're not as bad

I also think that because things ramped up in the pandemic, you had college as a university

“spending more time and money, addressing mental health, right?”

So interesting. They started to say, oh, well, we can't provide in-person. We're going to provide telehealth, and people start getting used to telehealth. So you could have visits with college campus or with college counseling, over telehealth. And that is continued, right?

So there's greater access, there's more understanding of people being able to access help. And so I think all of that is good. Yeah, and we're seeing hopefully the good effects of that. That's right. Okay.

This is something I hear about quite a bit, both from parents and kids, which

is, you know, teasing apart sadness and depression, which is not always so easy, but then

we got such a great question from a parent, which is, I find myself getting scared whenever my kid is down. And I'm hearing that, right? Like, parents, very much on pins and needles. And so that question of, like, how do I know when it's really time to worry?

Hmm. Yeah. So, I think for this parent and for all the parents that feel fear when they see their kids down, I think the first thing is, you know, just checking it, like, where is your mind going?

Right? Are you assuming that the down, it makes something inevitable, right?

Like, oh, I'm seeing my kid down, that probably means that they're depressed, and that

probably is going to lead to suicide, and that's right. What story is being told?

“So I think that's an important thing for parents to check in about.”

I also think that there's an important distinction between sad and depressed, right? You don't really use it very much out in the general public, but, you know, for mental health professionals, it's a very big difference, right? Sad is short term, it's usually, you know, related to something, you pop it in, pops out, right?

You know, it's, it's part of the ups and downs in life, but depressed. Stuff's here's you up, right? Exactly. It's something nice happened to feel better. Yeah.

Exactly. But, you know, depressed, they're very specific symptoms. And interestingly, with, with DSM5, which came out in 2013, people started using it in 2015, they actually added suicidal thoughts and behaviors as a symptom of major depression, right, of depression episodes, actually.

And so, so there is a piece of this that connects depression and suicide risk. I guess what I would say to parents who are feeling scared is, uh, check in about what the fear really is telling you, and there's probably something really valuable in that. And, and if the value is, I'm afraid, because I don't know what to do, then there are lots of people you can check in with, right?

You can check in the, the, you can call 988. It might not seem like it's sort of your standard crisis, but you can be like, hey, I'm really scared. My kid has been whatever the symptoms are, right? I just don't know what to do, right?

If you have insurance, there are a lot of, like, the telehealth nursing things. Those can be great, uh, and perhaps the most valuable would be to, um, check in with your kid. And say, hey, I'm noticing these, and I don't understand why exactly, but I'm, I'm scared, right?

And, and that vulnerability and that sort of genuineness might actually be the thing that prompts a connecting conversation that unpacks a whole bunch of things that you didn't realize need to be unpacked. I love it. I wish there was like a yard sticker, something where you can tell the difference between

when a child or a teen is threatening suicide versus when you know they are actually serious and going to take their lives. Is there, in your experience, something that can be telling or advice for parents? Because sometimes when kids are upset, they'll like, sometimes throw that out. We had a question from a parent about that, like, what are parents supposed to do with that?

Yeah.

“Um, so we say that it's important to take any disclosure of suicide, seriously, right?”

So if somebody's like, well, I'm going to kill myself, and you're like, okay, is this like, let's talk about this, right? And then they might be like, I'm not actually going to do it. You're terrible, right? And they sort of like get upset and everything like that.

I mean, I know that one of my kids when they were little, I think they, you know, because they would hear me talk about suicide because it's my job, right? And then I think that they, they kind of picked up on it and there was a little phase

And in my mind, I was 99% sure that they weren't at all, that 1% always scary, right?

And so what I did was I had conversations with them several times about why that phrase and was not really going to get him what he wanted, right? That really what he was, he was feeling powerless in that situation. And so he was saying something that was powerful. And we just had to kind of get to that now, that's a six year old in terms of an adolescent.

I think still some education around phrases like, you know, KMS, KYS, kill myself, kill

yourself that you might have a kid text, right? Like, if I don't pass this test, I'm

going to can't, you know, KMS, I don't know, it's all, and I'm heard of that packing. Yeah, unpacking that that is, that is, as an intensifier, it, it might make sense with your peers, but as an adult hearing it, we have a different relationship with that.

“So letting them know that I think is important, but you can also look and see if there”

are other things that have been going on such as deactivating from social media, other warning signs like, they have been irritated or irritable, agitated, they have been angry with people they normally wouldn't be angry with, right? Like, like, mad at the coach, mad at the teacher, mad at everybody. Yeah, exactly. Like, I can't believe you yelled at grandma over Thanksgiving, what is wrong with you? You know, those sorts of things can, can clue you in,

and then if on top of that they're saying things like, well, I'm just going to kill myself. Then that's when you're like, okay, poor sleep, irritability, disconnected from social media, and said this, even though they said that, they were joking, I don't really believe it, like, we're going to move forward with this. Jonathan, I sometimes said to teenagers, is that something you're really thinking about? Or is that just how upset you feel right now?

Does that pass the test for you? Totally, I love it. Okay. Okay. Okay. Lisa language, I love that because sometimes you just don't even know the words of how to approach something like that, you know? I know even in our community here in Connecticut, we've experienced suicide. There are other communities who have and just don't know what you do in that moment. One listener writes and asking, a student in my teen circle died by suicide. How do I

talk with my son about this, help him process it, and keep checking in over the coming weeks? What's your suggestion? Yeah, when you have a kid, and I'm assuming that this was a kid

“that everybody knew? Yeah, teen circle, teen circle, that's what kid and their circle. Yeah.”

So, I mean, the first thing is that I would do is just check in and say there are lots of ways

that people feel the grief and the sadness of somebody dying, especially somebody dying, suddenly, especially somebody dying like this. Right. And acknowledge that there is a variety of okay ways of processing this, right? And that could be feeling numb, could be hours and hours of crying, could be anger, all of these things, and letting kids know first of all that all of these are normal, right? I think can be really helpful. So, there's the acknowledging the different ways

that we process this, and then everybody's going to process it differently. And the other thing is to talk about, especially for older adolescents, some things that are not healthy, right? So, like, if you are like, if everybody's really upset, it's not healthy to all get together and get high, you know, get drunk, and have that mixture of intense emotion and altered states. I mean, there are lots of reasons why drinking and doing drugs is problematic, but particularly

in this situation, you're not going to have adolescents be able to really engaging good problem-solving at that point, and things might end up getting worse in ways that nobody in the

“community really wants. I would also say that as parents having those, I think Lisa, in past conversations”

you and I have talked about the car ride, right? Opportunities to just where nobody else has anything to do to just talk, right? And I think those are really important to do in whatever way that looks,

"Oh my God, I got to talk to my parents now. They're so worried about me. I have to say something

so that they're not so worried about me." Right? So anyway, those are just some thoughts on something. I love that. I love that. Are we at another question from the listener? We are really making good use of your time. We're asking you all the hard questions. How do you, how do you talk to

“younger siblings of teens when there's been in the teen self-injury or a suicide attempt?”

Yeah, so in this situation you have, you have a younger sibling who knows something is going on. Right? Because the parents have been focused, they might not have been explicit. I think one way that

you can do it, and obviously it's age-dependent, talk to a five-year-old's different than talk to a nine-year-old,

but you can say, "You know, we want to bring you into what we've been doing." Right? And so you sort of sanctify the space, right? And say, "We are now going to bring you into this conversation." And we're going to share that, you know, your older sibling has been having a really hard time. And doing some things that are not so safe, but we're working on making sure that they're safe. And we know that we haven't paid a lot of attention to you lately, and we want to

explain why. Doesn't have anything to do with, like you didn't do anything wrong. We know that it's been tough. These are the things that we're going to be doing with your sibling. And these are sometimes we might be gone, and this is what we're going to do. Right? So just sort of being very concrete in that conversation is really important. You don't have to go into like, you know, the struggling with this kind of thought or there's this conflict or whatever,

“whatever, because honestly, like kids will pick up on enough of that in the way that they understand it,”

that they're just explaining the structure of what's going on. And then you say, and we would love to be able to answer all the questions. I love that. I love that. Of course, you have questions, and this is the time. We can keep this conversation going. I love that. So Jonathan, sometimes, you know, a young person attempts to decide, and survives. But how does that family not feel

on it going forward? Yeah. First of all, I don't think it's reasonable to expect a family

who has had a child attempt suicide be totally chill and comfortable right after. Like that would suggest there is a long, you know, the right feelings at the right time kind of thing. I think that the where the rubber meets the road without though is that if you're on edge,

“because you're worried the kid is going to attempt again, right? The question is, with what?”

Under what circumstances and so maybe this is this is a little bit of a warning for you as parents to say, we are not confident that the environment is physically safe. And so then to do things to make it physically safe, some standard things are obviously if there are any firearms in the home, get the firearms out, right? Disconnect the remove the bullets from, you know, the fire. I'm getting them over to neighbors. Make sure your neighbors don't have accessible firearms

because kids can go over to people's houses and use them. That's not an uncommon thing to happen. Same with any other method, you know, see the minifin, knives, you know, rope, things like that, right? All of those things secure the environment. If the unease, if the being on edge is not about that, it's probably something to do with, I don't know how to support my kid, right? This thing just happened. We're so grateful that they've they lived and not sure how to move forward.

And I think that, you know, drawing from Guy Diamonds work and attachment-based family therapy can be really useful. He has this whole structure for how to set up conversations with kids. And one of the things that parents can do is to say, look, I imagine there are probably lots of things you do not want to talk about and you don't want to tell me. One of the things that you absolutely should tell me is if you are having these thoughts, abandoning your life, if you are

starting to think about ways to do it, because that's 100% my job is to make sure that you are able to stick around. We desperately want you to stick around. And I would love to hear these things.

have to worry about getting in trouble, whatever the caveat is, right? Just open up the conversation for them to be able to share that, because then that hopefully will reduce some of that sense of like, I'm on edge because I don't know what's going on or I don't know what to do. I love hearing the language. I mean, it's like you're going to have the theory, but hearing your words of how to say it, how to ask the question. Okay, so we're thinking about prevention.

That's the goal always with suicide. And I know there's a whole new frontier emerging and

I know you're actually working in this space around AI and its possibilities to help us do incredible work here. Tell us a little bit about that. So AI, right, this is kind of like having the conversation about like, wow, there's this new thing called the World Wide Web in like 1990. What do you think? Like, how might it change the world? Like, we really don't know what is going to happen, but I will say that there are a couple of things related to suicide,

“related to families and kids. I think are really important for folks to know. Number one,”

has been well advertised or sort of shared in the media, kids and adults are using LLMs,

large language models like Chatchee PT and Gemini and these other products, as emotional support. And they were not designed for emotional support. They use words like, oh, I know how you feel. Right, the use of the word I suggest that it's a person. It's not a person. It's a computer program, right? So there's a way in which it encourages folks to continue to share these things. There was a New York Times piece that talked about the kid who died by suicide after

chatting with Chatchee PT and one of the things that Kashmir Hill, the reporter wrote about was that the guardrails that open AI had put in place failed and and Chatchee PT ended up doing

“things that no human would ever do, just they wouldn't. And so I think one of the things for parents”

to know about that side of of AI is that it's important for us to talk with our kids about what AI is and is not and can and cannot do. And yeah, so maybe homework help is fine, maybe having chatting conversations about some things is okay, but AI at the moment doesn't know what to do when you're actually talking about things that are potentially life threatening, right? I also think that there is a value for parents in using AI in a consultative way to say,

hey, this situation has come up, I would like you, so you can use this phrase with any of the large language models. I would like to talk with an expert in suicide prevention about how I as a parent can address an issue with my kid. I love that. I use AI a lot. This is all new to me. This is brilliant. And so that any question we didn't get to today, that would be what you would recommend. This is to ask AI do this as a suicide expert. Yes, absolutely. And you can even,

you can even throw in words like, I will use myself as an example, not because I'm the example or because it's me. You can say, I would like you to answer questions like Jonathan Singer. Yes, yes, John his work. Yes. Yeah, John his work. Do this. And the reason why that's helpful, you're giving AI a persona. You're giving it parameters because it was trained on everything. And when you're giving it parameters, it narrows it down as a parent, you can say, hey,

I'm really, it's really hard for me to bring this up. Can you help me practice talking about this? Give me feedback about how my responses are either supportive of conversation encouraging that or not.

“And it'll do it. Again, this is, this is, I think, a useful, a good use of AI, right?”

Because you're not saying, I'm at risk. You're saying, hey, I'd like some feedback.

Amazing. Amazing. So I want to get a sense from you. There's so much information

thrown under on me. But what gives you hope in this moment in 2026? So I think that one of the things that we talked about early on was this idea that things seem to be looking up for college students. And I do wonder if there is this trend with the decrease in suicide rates for adolescents. We're seeing an upward trend for college students.

it would be an improvement or at least not a decline in in well-being, right? And so that,

that actually gives me some hope. I have seen a lot of content on social media for parents that I actually think is really helpful, that I've been surprised by all of the details that people are providing in terms of how to support families and kids and things like that. So as much as social media can be a cesspool, I actually think that there's great resources out there. And I'm not being paid to say this, but I actually think Lisa, you're your website

and the AI chatbot that you have. Yeah, Rosalie, my chatbot, yeah. It is a phenomenal resource

and it is a great example of the kinds of things that weren't out there the last time we talked, right? So really sort of seeing the resources. Yeah, okay. So for listeners who don't know because we don't talk about it that often, Rosalie is an AI powered librarian who lives on my website who answers questions based only on my work. So you can ask her about all sorts of things and she'll also then send you to the source material. The podcast where we talked about it

at the New York Times piece I wrote. Yeah, AI is definitely double-edged and the more that we

“can make good use of the good edge, I think the better. Yeah, 100%. Well Jonathan, you are the best.”

I am so grateful for the work you do. I love learning from you. I learn so much every time we're together. Thank you. Thank you for joining us and thank you for what you do. I'm so honored. Thank you so much. I love your podcast as a real honor pleasure to be back on it. So thank you. You bet. Dr. Jonathan Singer, thank you again for joining us. Such a fascinating conversation with so many details. He's just so good. Tell me what you have for parenting to go.

So one of the things I've learned from Jonathan and this didn't come up directly and I want to make sure we include it is that if you are worried about a young person and their safety,

“the best thing to do are consensus as a field is just to ask. And the language I've learned from him”

is you say to a kid, you know, listen because you haven't seen yourself or you've seemed down, you know, you give them some explanation. Have you had any thoughts of harming yourself or ending your life? You want to be that direct? And I know we worry about that. We worry that if we ask, we're going to give them the idea and research tells us that's not true. And in fact, what we know is if a kid's thinking about it, they're really glad you asked. So that's the thing to do.

Great advice, Lisa. Thank you. And a difficult topic to talk about. So I'm so glad we have this

“conversation. Me too. Next week, we're going to talk about whether you should be tracking”

your kid's location. I'll see you next week. I'll see you next week. I'll see you next week. At Dr. LisaDemore.com. And now we're word from our lawyers. The advice provided on this podcast is not constitute or serve as a substitute for professional psychological treatment therapy or other types of professional advice or intervention. If you have concerns about your child's well-being, consult a physician or mental health professional. If you're looking for additional resources,

check out Lisa's website at Dr. LisaDemore.com.