County Coroner Data Clashes With CDC Data on Suicides

Wyoming is regularly listed as the state with the highest suicide rate. A chart on the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) website lists it as having a 32.3 age-adjusted suicide rate, past Montana, Alaska and New Mexico. A recent report from the state’s department of health detailed how the problem was only getting worse in 2020, while news reports highlighted how suicides in the the Cowboy state doubled the national average.

The Wyoming county with the current highest suicide rate, Fremont County, is shown in CDC data as having 17 suicides in 2021 alone—a high number considering how sparsely populated the county is with only 40,000 residents. That puts the crude death rate by suicide at over 42 per 100,000 people.

A previous Wyoming Department of Health analysis showed Fremont with the second highest suicide rate in the state over ten years, second only to Hot Springs County.

Yet a county coroner’s report for the first half of 2023 only lists 3 suicides. At that rate—6 per year or 15 per 100,000— the county would be around the 30th percentile of counties in the United States, rather than the 99th percentile.

In the first half of 2022 it was slightly higher at 5. An annual report for 2018 listed just 5 deaths in total for the year—possibly one of the lowest rates in the whole country.

There may be some discrepancy in how the county coroner classifies suicides versus how they are classified by the CDC, but in general the CDC data is a compilation of data that comes from death certificates, so they are both dealing with the same source of data.

A previous Investigative Economics analysis of CDC data on male teen suicides showed large swings over the last few decades with no discernible explanation. Certain areas would see large spikes in suicide, other saw large drops, while others saw no change at all. Areas of high Native American populations would continue to see ongoing high suicide rates for decades.