WEDNESDAY, Oct. 28, 2026 (HealthDay News) — Suicidal thoughts and actions spiked among middle-aged and senior Americans in the years following the COVID-19 pandemic, a new study says.
Suicidal thoughts increased by nearly 43% among Americans 50 and older, according to findings recently published in the Journal of Affective Disorders.
Meanwhile, suicide planning and suicide attempts more than tripled, researchers found.
These increases were concentrated among people without traditional risk factors for suicide, such as major depression or alcohol use disorder, researchers said.
“These findings suggest that many older adults who are struggling are not the ones our current screening approaches are designed to catch,” noted lead researcher Dr. Kevin Yang, a research fellow in psychiatry at the UCLA National Clinician Scholars Program.
“If a growing share of suicidal thoughts and plans is showing up in people without a depression diagnosis or recent substance use, we need to rethink how we identify risk and reach older adults before a crisis occurs,” Yang said in a university news release.
For the new study, researchers analyzed data from nearly 42,500 adults 50 and older who participated in a federal survey on drug use and health between 2021 to 2024.
Results showed that suicide planning increased by about 256% and suicide attempts by 263% among middle-aged folks and seniors in the years after the pandemic.
That meant that suicide planning increased from 0.3% to 1.1% of those surveyed, and suicide attempts from 0.2% to 0.6%, the study found.
Overall, suicidal thoughts affected 2.9% of older Americans in 2024 compared to 2% in 2021, researchers found.
These increases in suicidal thoughts and planning occurred mainly among people without major depression or use of substances such as alcohol:
Suicidal thoughts increased from 1.2% to 2.2% among people without a past-year diagnosis of major depression, and from 1.4% to 3.3% among people who didn’t drink.
Suicide planning increased from 0.1% to 0.8% of those without a past-year diagnosis of depression, but it remained relatively stable for those diagnosed with depression (4.2% to 5.3%).
“Currently, suicide prevention efforts among middle-aged and older adults rely heavily on screening for depression and other mental health conditions, primarily within primary care settings where the majority of this population receives mental health care,” the researchers wrote in their study.
Yang's team stressed that the study was not designed to determine cause-and-effect, and it cannot explained why the rise in suicidal thoughts or attempts occurred.
Nevertheless, the findings “highlight a need for broader risk assessment frameworks that extend beyond psychiatric symptoms to include other factors that may be uniquely relevant to this population, such as social isolation, loneliness, bereavement, financial strain, functional decline and frailty,” researchers concluded.
If you or someone you know is experiencing a mental health crisis, expert and confidential advice is available 24/7 on the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
More information
Johns Hopkins Medicine has more on depression and suicide.
SOURCE: UCLA, news release, Oct. 23, 2026
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