Oregon has a youth suicide problem that is both worse than the national picture and getting more unequal.
The numbers
In 2024, Oregon's youth suicide rate was 13.2 per 100,000, representing 101 deaths. That is the 15th highest rate in the United States, against a national average of 9.7.
Those are children. One hundred and one of them, in one year, in one state.
| The number underneath the number Between 2018 and 2024, suicides among non-Hispanic white Oregon youth fell 34 percent. Over the same period, suicides among Oregon youth of colour rose 9 percent. Read those two sentences together. Prevention in Oregon has been working. It has not been working for everyone. |
Critical Reflection
Look at your own building. If your prevention efforts are reaching the students who already know how to ask for help, who is that leaving out, and would you be able to tell?
What students say about themselves
The Oregon Student Health Survey asks students directly. In 2025, 3.7 percent of 8th graders reported a suicide attempt in the past year, compared with 2.8 percent of 11th graders. In 2024 the same comparison ran 4.1 percent against 3.4 percent.
The pattern holds across two years: 8th graders report more past-year attempts than 11th graders. Sixth graders report fewer than both, so the shape is a peak in 8th grade rather than a climb with age.
This matters for anyone deciding which grades to screen. The intuition that risk rises with age does not survive contact with the data. The transition years, entering middle school and entering high school, are where the numbers concentrate.
SAFER's own screening data, which covers 9th through 12th grade, shows 10th grade with the highest High Risk rate. Different instrument, different question, same direction: the risk is not where most schools assume it is.
What these numbers are not
They are not a prediction. Rates describe a population, and no student is a rate.
They are also not the whole picture. Oregon's published reports do not break mental health outcomes out by race, sexual orientation, gender identity or housing status, even though the survey collects all four. The equity gap above is visible in mortality data and invisible in the survey data.
