On a summer day at UC Berkeley, four teenagers jostled at a whiteboard, vying to write down their solutions to an important public health concern. They were having fun even as they took on a heavy task: helping researchers design programs to reduce the skyrocketing suicide rate among Black youth.
In the United States, deaths by suicide have been surging among Black kids and teens for decades. For those between 10 and 17 years of age, the suicide rate rose 144% from 2007 to 2020. What's more, Black boys die by suicide more than twice as frequently as Black girls, although the suicide rate for Black girls increased by 182% between 2001 and 2017.
As the teenagers brainstormed, Jasmin Brooks Stephens, a Berkeley assistant professor of psychology, watched nearby. The moment was a highlight in research she was conducting with the Homeless Children's Network on improving mental health outcomes for Black youth. Brooks Stephens believed that teens themselves have meaningful ideas to share, and she had worked for eight weeks with these particular teenagers, who were part of the network's Jabali Youth Advocacy organization, culminating in their trip to campus.
One of the most exciting things was seeing them all jump up and say, 'Wait, we can make a program for making us feel better? We have the power to do that?'
Jasmin Brooks Stephens, UC Berkeley
"One of the most exciting things was seeing them all jump up and say, 'Wait, we can make a program for making us feel better? We have the power to do that?'" Brooks Stephens recalled. "Seeing them find and discover that sense of agency in themselves - that was invaluable to me." It also was one of the few times any of the teens had visited a college campus, she said, an added bonus. In future work, Brooks Stephens plans to translate the results of her study for clinicians and policymakers who are trying to improve suicide prevention for Black youth.
The ongoing project is just one example of how Brooks Stephens is working to address rising suicide rates among Black youth by engaging them in participatory research - an unusual and hopeful approach in suicide prevention studies. "This summer I had the incredible opportunity to work alongside young people to design a program that would help other young people want to live," she said. "Rather than waiting until a young person is already in crisis, I'm interested in understanding what helps youth thrive - what gives them hope and a sense of possibility and helps them recognize the brilliance they have inside them."
A pathway to hope in the face of racism
Despite the growing crisis among Black youth, suicide rates are dropping for adolescents in the U.S. overall. Brooks Stephens finds these statistics revealing: "To me, that suggests that the approaches we have relied on have not adequately addressed the conditions driving suicide risk in Black communities," she said.
Kayla Elisse
It's easy to talk about structural racism as an abstract concept, or personal encounters with racists as disturbing but bounded moments. But grappling with racism heavily impacts Black youth and increases their suicide risk, according to a 2023 report from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Indeed, Brooks Stephens has published work documenting how racial discrimination and the COVID-19 pandemic, which disproportionately harmed Black Americans, together worsened suicide risk for Black young adults.
Brooks Stephens' work is informed by both her research and her own experience of how race can shape young people's sense of self. "I became aware very early on that Black children are often navigating expectations about who they are supposed to be before they have even had the opportunity to figure out who they are for themselves," she said. "That has stayed with me - the importance of creating space for Black young people to define themselves, recognize their strengths, and imagine who they want to become." At the same time, she saw how the stigma surrounding mental health could make it harder for Black youth and families to seek support, even as racism and other chronic stressors were impacting their well-being.
When she took an African American psychology class as an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, with Enrique Neblett, a renowned scholar of race and health who became her mentor, Brooks Stephens saw the connection between those experiences - and found her passion. "I realized that there was an entire field devoted to understanding how racism affects mental health and how Black children come to understand themselves and their racial identity," she said.
Later, during her doctoral research at the University of Houston, Brooks Stephens worked with Rheeda Walker, an expert on suicide science and African American adult mental health research. Brooks Stephens noticed that there was very limited discussion about building upstream resilience in suicide prevention research - an approach that focuses on child well-being and happiness before the development of a mental health crisis.
"We're studying why people choose to end their life without understanding what makes people want to live," she said. For Brooks Stephens, that realization opened up a different way of thinking about suicide prevention, one that made room for the strengths that were often absent from traditional models, such as racial identity, spirituality, family connection, belonging or hope.
Focusing on strengths to prevent suicide
Brooks Stephens knows she can't single-handedly eliminate the racial traumas faced by young Black people. Nor can she end other factors that lead to higher suicide rates in her community, such as systemic injustice or poverty. Instead, she's focusing on where she can make a difference through her research.
"While I may not be able to eradicate racism, I can help build programs that change how Black young people see themselves and their futures - programs that help them feel grounded in their identity and able to imagine a life that feels worth living," she said.
Courtesy of Jasmin Brooks Stephens
As a first step, this year she and colleagues created the Black Youth Thriving Framework for Suicide Prevention. It's based on a literature review that identified six protective factors that can reduce suicidality among Black youth, including family support, community ties and self acceptance. "What we're working to identify now are the strategies that can help cultivate those strengths in young people's lives," Brooks Stephens said.
Already, in a study from 2023, she and her colleagues showed that Black young adults with stronger feelings of self-acceptance are less vulnerable to depression and suicide. Likewise, she has identified mindfulness and meditation as potential tools for Black Americans in their early 20s to buffer the impulsivity that is often associated with suicide risk.
This approach is a radical departure from the status quo. Right now, resources for preventing suicide orbit around moments of crisis, Brooks Stephens said. When a child shows signs of depression or arrives at a hospital following a suicide attempt, that's when an intervention is often provided. Brooks Stephens wants to develop research-backed ways to prevent a child from ever getting to that troubling point in the first place.
And increasingly, she is asking Black young people themselves to help determine what those approaches should look like. Brooks Stephens said that the four teens with whom she worked this summer were not simply research participants; they were collaborators in imagining what suicide prevention could become.
"It's very uplifting for me because I'm bringing underserved voices into our research and I'm designing solutions," she said. "And those solutions are how we make kids want to live and love themselves. That's it. It's loving themselves, loving their life. That's what I'm helping them discover."
