For nearly a decade and a half, Michel Martin has carried a private grief that she rarely allowed into her professional life. Her brother died by suicide on May 10, 2010, and while she thought of him constantly, she found she could not speak about how he died. When suicide came up in conversation, she would leave the room, a habit she acknowledges is not especially practical for someone who works in news.
That silence, she has concluded, is not protecting anyone. It is precisely why she decided to confront the subject publicly.
Martin, an NPR host, led a live event titled "Going There: A Matter of Life and Death," produced in connection with NPR's Morning Edition. The gathering assembled clinicians, lawmakers, and people who have lived with the aftermath of suicide to examine a crisis that is worsening in Black communities across the United States.
The numbers behind the conversation are stark. According to CDC data, suicide rates among Black Americans have increased by more than 50% over roughly the past decade. The trend is especially pronounced among young Black people, and in 2022 the rate of firearm suicides among Black youth surpassed that of white youth — a reversal with profound implications for prevention efforts.
These figures arrive at a moment when government-backed public health programs are pulling back from initiatives tailored to specific communities. Martin framed the event as an effort to address the problem directly, with care, sensitivity, and honesty, rather than allowing it to remain in the shadows.
The panel reflected a deliberate cross-section of American life. It included Debra Lee, CEO emerita of BET; Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, a New Jersey Democrat; Dr. Paul Nestadt, a psychiatrist and medical director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Suicide Prevention; retired NFL champion Vernon Davis; WWE superstar Ettore "Big E" Ewen; and Rev. Johnny Parker, who serves both as a pastor and a counselor. A live audience of people who had experienced suicide loss firsthand sat in on the discussion.
Central to the conversation was the question of why this crisis is accelerating, how it is reshaping Black families and communities, and — most urgently — what can be done to slow it.
Vernon Davis, a Super Bowl-winning tight end, offered one of the evening's most personal accounts. He described experiencing panic attacks and depression during his playing career, moments when he would retreat to a bench, struggle to breathe, and briefly feel as though he had nothing to live for. The feeling, he said, arrived suddenly and passed quickly, but its intensity left a lasting mark.
Davis has since made mental health a daily priority. After losing both a brother and a sister in close succession, he began speaking more openly about what he had endured. His motivation is straightforward: there are people facing the same struggles he did, and they need to know someone else has walked that path.
His testimony illustrates a theme running through the panel — that visibility and shared experience can function as a form of intervention. When public figures describe their own psychological pain, they weaken the stigma that keeps many Black Americans from seeking help.
Dr. Nestadt's presence brought a clinical dimension to the discussion. As a psychiatrist specializing in suicide prevention, he was positioned to connect individual stories to broader patterns in the data, including the role of access to firearms in rising youth deaths.
Rep. Watson Coleman's participation pointed to the policy side of the equation. With federal and state public health efforts increasingly retreating from community-specific programming, the question of who bears responsibility for addressing disparities becomes more pressing, not less.
The inclusion of Rev. Parker reflected another reality: in many Black communities, churches remain a primary point of contact for people in distress, and pastors often find themselves on the front lines of a mental health crisis that formal systems are not adequately reaching.
The event also served as an acknowledgment that the subject has long been under-discussed in Black households and institutions. Cultural expectations of resilience, religious interpretations of suffering, and a legacy of medical mistrust can all discourage open conversation about suicidal thoughts.
Martin's own account underscores how deeply that reluctance can run, even for someone whose job requires engaging with difficult subjects daily. Her brother's death was a fact she lived with but could not voice, and she describes her decision to speak now as a necessary correction rather than a comfortable one.
The broader picture is one of a public health emergency that is not distributed evenly. Suicide has long been treated as a crisis affecting the country as a whole, but the sharp rise among Black Americans — and particularly among Black youth — suggests that general approaches have not reached everyone.
For families, the implications are immediate. For clinicians, they involve questions of access, culturally competent care, and screening. For lawmakers, they involve funding decisions made in a constrained environment. For communities, they involve the slow work of making it possible to say out loud what has too often gone unspoken.
Martin's conclusion is neither clinical nor political. It is personal: the silence surrounding suicide among Black Americans has not shielded anyone from its toll. Talking about it, she argues, is not a betrayal of privacy or strength. It is the first step toward keeping more people alive.
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