Editor’s note: This story discusses suicide. Please use discretion while reading. If you or someone you know is in crisis, contact the national mental health hotline by dialing 988.

Carlos Brown woke up last March to a phone call from his wife, an emergency dispatcher for Dinwiddie County.

She got a call at work from one of their son’s friends, who told her  their son Christian said he didn’t want to live anymore. She asked Brown to check on the 17-year-old, who they call Bam.

Brown found nothing in Bam’s room except for an empty gun holster.

He drove through their Petersburg neighborhood, hoping to find Bam safe at a friend’s house.

Instead, he came upon the flashing lights of a police car. Officers told him Bam had shot himself, shattering his jawbone and most of his teeth.

Bam survived after weeks in the intensive care unit at the VCU Health Center, but lost eyesight in one eye and is still raising money to replace his teeth. 

Brown doesn’t know what made Bam shoot himself but he knows it could’ve been worse.

“Compared to what I went through, I can’t imagine those people who actually lost their children,” Brown said. “I don’t want anybody to go through that.”

The Browns’ story has become a more common one among Black Virginia families with male children and young adults under  24 years old, according to recent data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Brown said he remembers his son expressing sadness over the strained relationship between his parents.

Still, he got good grades, had friends and even a girlfriend at the time he attempted suicide.

“I had no idea he was that depressed,” Brown said. “It’s tough, especially when you look at a man. It doesn’t matter what color he is.”

Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the suicide rate among young Black males in Virginia has risen higher than the nationwide average and higher than in most other states, according to recent data from the Centers for Disease Control.

Historically, white males have had the highest suicide rates among people age 10-24. But in Virginia in 2020 and 2021, the suicide rates for Black boys and young men exceeded the rates for corresponding white males.

The trend is visible in local health care facilities, schools and even barbershops, where men have started gathering to talk about the challenges they face in a culture that often encourages men – especially Black males –  to bury their emotions.

CHKD child psyhologist Camille Carson sees more young Black patients than ever getting emergency care for suicide attempts and non-suicidal self harm, like cutting.

But on the outpatient side, where she spends most of her time, Carson doesn’t see as many young, Black boys and young men in regular therapy.

“That tends to mean our Black and brown males are waiting until  … the situation boils up to a point where they can't manage it to show us that they need help,” she said.

In 2007, there were 8.5 suicides per 100,000 Black males between 10 and 24 years old in Virginia. In 2021, according to newly released data, the rate was 20.5 suicides per 100,000 population – an increase of 140%.

Most of the spike in suicides among Virginia’s Black boys happened during the past few years and doctors like Carson attribute that partially to the challenges of returning to “normal” after the pandemic.

“This is a critical period for our children and adolescents where they're learning social cues and how to engage socially and they've missed a good chunk of that,” she said. “They're just kind of being thrown back in there.”

Oftentimes, the young Black patients she sees in the hospital aren’t sure how to explain why they wanted to hurt themselves or end their lives. Some talk about being angry, which tips Carson off that there’s probably more going on.

“In mental health, we refer to anger as an iceberg in motion. It's at the tip top, but underneath that is a lot of other emotions that are going unexpressed, unacknowledged,” she said.

That’s true for many men, said Stephenie Howard, a social work professor at Norfolk State University, but especially so for Black men and boys.

“We don't allow men to emote, we don't allow them to be fully human to express all that they're experiencing,” Howard said. “In Black communities in particular, there is an expectation that we uphold this idea of masculinity and it can be really harmful to the identity of Black men.”

Bam wrote on his fundraising page he knew something wasn’t right, but he wasn’t sure how to communicate it.

“I feared that if I went to either of my parents, it wouldn't have been taken [seriously]. …  I couldn't answer the question, ‘What’s wrong?’” he wrote. 

“I am living and always have lived a blessed life.”

And even though the younger Brown wrote his parents were always loving and involved in his life, his father said he missed the signs.

“You won’t ever see it until it happens,” Brown said. “I had no idea he was that depressed.”

Suicide rates are climbing for all young Americans

To some extent, Virginia reflects a national trend documented in a recent CDC study. It found that suicide rates for Americans age 10-24 increased from 6.8 deaths per 100,000 population in 2007 to 11 deaths per 100,000 population in 2021.

Virginia had an even bigger increase in suicides among that age group. The rate for adolescent and young-adult Virginians went from below the national average in 2007, at 6.3 suicides per 100,000, to 12.5 suicides per 100,000 in 2021 - well above the national average

While the suicide rate for young Virginians nearly doubled during that period, the state’s overall suicide rate for residents of all ages went up a modest 21%: from 11.4 suicides per 100,000 population in 2007 to 13.8 suicides per 100,000 population in 2021.

Among young people, suicides rates in Virginia rose for both Blacks and whites, males and females. The biggest increase was among African Americans – with the vast majority of those deaths involving males.

The CDC says suicides are so rare (fewer than 10 in any given year) among young Black females in Virginia that the agency has suppressed those annual statistics.

While more men and boys end up in psychiatric or emergency care for suicide, dozens of others stave off crisis at Parlor Barbershop in Virginia Beach.

Shop owner Jay Rodriguez didn’t expect his shop to turn into a therapy office.

He used to ask his clients more casual questions, like did they catch the recent game? How’s the wife and kids? How’s work?

“Now it's more like, ‘Hey, man, how are you feeling? What's up with your day?’ Anything you want to get off your chest today or anything you want to share?”

Rodriguez noticed many of his male clients felt like nobody understood them. They weren’t sure how – or if – men should talk openly about their feelings.

He got the idea to start an informal group for some of his clients to meet each other and share their common stories and maybe, they could find support among each other. He reached out to Regent University to help and invited about 20 people.

More than 30 showed up, and Rodriguez is expecting more than double that for the next event.

Many of the men who attended Rodriguez’s empowerment group talked about lacking a male role model to show them how to interact with the world and handle their negative emotions.

That’s what Howard at NSU found during town halls with Courtney Pierce, a service coordinator with the Samaritan House, which worked with NSU on various community events to talk about mental health in the Black community.

“So many of them had to become the men that they wanted to see that they didn't have representation of,” Pierce said. “A lot of them talked about particular TV shows … like ‘Family Matters’ where there was a prominent father figure that dispensed love and care … and was a safe person to be around.”

Carlos Brown is quick to say he’s not an expert even after navigating the last year after his son’s suicide attempt. 

Instead he sticks to the basics of parenting.

“The only advice that I can think of is talk to them,” Brown said. “They're going to give you nonchalant answers, but at some point in time, they will open up.”

Brown is still figuring out how a family copes in the aftermath of a suicide attempt. Bam moved to live with family in Texas and returns to Virginia for surgeries. 

Some things are clear: There are dozens of hospital bills totaling more than $40,000 plus the cost of Christian’s reconstructive surgeries. 

“There's only one thing that I want more than anything in this world right now, and that's to give my son some teeth. It keeps me up at night,” Brown said. 

“I can't give him back his eyesight … but I just want him to be able to bite a sandwich.”

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