Suicide Rates by Industry and Occupation in the U.S., 2021

In 2021, 37,602 Americans of working age (16–64, employed or not) died by suicide — 17.8 per 100,000, a rise of about a third since 2001, when the rate was 13.4. To help target prevention, a team from CDC and its National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) — Aaron Sussell, Cora Peterson, Jia Li, Arialdi Miniño, Kenneth A. Scott and Deborah M. Stone — looked at those deaths by the kind of work people did.

Industry and occupation

The report sorts jobs two ways:

• Industry is what the employer does (or, for the self-employed, their own business) — construction, mining, health care.
• Occupation is the person's own job — carpenter, nurse, musician.

The data

The 2021 National Vital Statistics System file held 37,435 suicide deaths among people aged 16–64 who lived and died in 49 states; death certificates from Rhode Island and the District of Columbia did not record industry and occupation. The analysis kept the 30,015 people (80.2%) whose usual work was paid, classifiable and not military, leaving out homemakers, students, retirees, volunteers and others without a paid job.

Rates were calculated by sex for every group with at least 20 deaths, using employed-population counts from the 2021 American Community Survey. A group's rate counted as elevated when it was significantly higher than the rate for all workers of that sex: 32.0 per 100,000 for men and 8.0 for women.

Industries

Nine of 20 major industry groups had elevated rates for men, women or both:

Per 100,000 workers aged 16–64. Bold marks a rate significantly above the all-worker rate for that sex. — means not reported for that group.

Of 254 detailed industries, 31 had elevated rates. The highest:

Occupations

Among major occupation groups, the highest rates were in:

Of 492 detailed occupations, 60 had elevated rates. The highest:

Rates for every group are in CDC's supplementary tables (industries, occupations).

What it means

The pattern matches an earlier study of 32 states using 2016 National Violent Death Reporting System data, which also found elevated rates in mining, construction, other services, the arts and agriculture. The authors caution that these comparisons should not obscure the bigger picture: suicide among working-age Americans overall has risen by about a third in two decades, and more research into causes and prevention is needed.

Suicide risk has been linked to:

• low-skilled jobs and lower educational attainment;
• lower socioeconomic status, both absolute and relative;
• access to lethal means through work;
• job stress — poor support from supervisors and colleagues, little control over one's work, and job insecurity.

CDC began including decedents' usual industry and occupation in public NVSS data in 2020, opening new ways to track preventable deaths among workers.

Limitations

1. Apart from sex, the analysis did not account for factors such as age, race and ethnicity, or education that could explain differences between groups.
2. It covers only people with classifiable paid work on the death certificate, and how jobs get recorded there is linked to people's sociodemographic characteristics.
3. Military workers and people 65 and older were not included.
4. Death certificates record a person's usual work, while the population counts reflect current jobs, so numerators and denominators do not match exactly.

Workplaces as places for prevention

Suicide is preventable through a comprehensive public health approach, and workplaces can build evidence-based strategies into their existing policies: limiting access to lethal means, offering peer support, improving access to mental health services, and reducing stigma so people seek care more easily. CDC's Suicide Prevention Resource for Action and NIOSH's Critical Steps Your Workplace Can Take Today to Prevent Suicide set out how.

If you or someone you know is thinking about suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline in the United States.

Sources

Based on Sussell A, Peterson C, Li J, Miniño A, Scott KA, Stone DM, "Suicide Rates by Industry and Occupation — National Vital Statistics System, United States, 2021," MMWR, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; a work of the United States government in the public domain.