Fall is a time of transition for many young people. They may be starting a new academic year in college or technical school. They may have recently entered the workforce or the military. Those life changes could put vulnerable young adults at risk for mental health problems, even suicide.
Next to unintentional injury, suicide is the leading cause of death among college-age people. It’s a vulnerable time, said clinical psychologist Adam Horwitz of the University of Michigan.
"There might be a lot more independence, self-reliance, less structure. from a biological standpoint, [for] folks in their later teens, early 20s.
"That's when we sometimes see first onset for different mood disorders come into play.
The prefrontal cortex, which is in charge of our judgment and decision making, is still not fully developed until mid-20s. So there's still susceptibility [in] that reward and pleasure center, which can lead to risky behaviors, things like substance use."
Suicide rates in this age group have risen, Horwitz said.
"They kind of peaked in the year or two after COVID and came back down, but they're still quite a bit higher than what they were, say, about 10 years ago.
"So for example, there's this annual, what's called the Healthy Mind Study that surveys college students from all sorts of different institutions across the United States. And in the most recent cohort, 37% were meeting that screening threshold for probable depression, compared to 25% back in 2015, 2016," he said.
Young adults who do not go on to college may be at even greater risk, Horwitz said.
"Those who don't go to college include folks who may not have graduated high school and that might be because of a substance use issue or a mental health issue and things like that," he said. "So it's not necessarily the setting itself that is either protective or risky, but there are some of those pre-selection factors that might come into play that makes risk a little bit higher among those who are not attending college."
There is some good news, though.
"At the same time, we also see rates of treatment-seeking increasing in those groups with 38% receiving therapy in the past year compared to only 23% in that 24 to 25, or in the 2015, 2016 cohort," Horwitz said.
Promoting a sense of community and belonging is also very important for mental health, said psychiatrist Christine Yu Moutier of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.
"Anything that encourages early connection to support, both peer support as well as clinical treatment, can reduce suicide risk," she said.
It's helpful when those experiencing thoughts of suicide can relate on an identity level with those intervening, such as people answering 24/7 hotlines, said Jasmin Brooks Stephens, a clinical psychologist at UC Berkeley who studies culturally responsive mental health therapy.
For instance, Stephens cited a 2023 study that showed that nearly half of callers to an LGBTQ-plus youth crisis line reported that they would have not contacted a non-LGBTQ- plus line.
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