Suicide: the official record, at its own strength

The state's annual count — Indiana Code 16-37-5

The record counts by county, and this section does not invent a city figure: Suicide enters this history only where the official record carries it, and the official record's geography is the county. Indiana law requires the Department of Health to report annually on the state's suicide and overdose deaths; the report for 2023, issued in November 2024, counts 1,184 suicide deaths in Indiana that year, at an age-adjusted rate of 16.9 per 100,000 against a provisional national rate of 14.2 — the state's deaths tabulated by county of residence, St. Joseph County's among them. No city series exists in any official publication reached: Mishawaka's dead are inside the county count, inseparable from it in the published record, and this section prints no Mishawaka figure because none exists to print. The local episodes the record does carry stand elsewhere in this section at their documented size — the Penn High School student's death in 2004, which brought the TeenScreen program to the district and, in its aftermath, the region's consent case; and the crisis machinery the present system answers with: the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, live nationally on 16 July 2022 under the Division of Mental Health and Addiction's oversight in Indiana; the designated center's crisis services, Oaklawn's, available to this city as to the county; and the county's walk-in behavioral health crisis center, open since 2023 in the Epworth building across the river, at the size the South Bend record gives it. What the older record holds — the coroners' verdicts and press notices of earlier centuries — was not assembled for this section at the strength this history requires, and no episode from it is printed on a weaker one; the Enterprise and Tribune runs and the county coroner's record are its named settling sources.

Sources:

1. Indiana Department of Health, Indiana Overdose and Suicide Report, 2023 (issued 28 November 2024, under Indiana Code 16-37-5) — the statewide count of 1,184 suicide deaths in 2023 and the age-adjusted rate of 16.9 per 100,000 against the provisional national 14.2, from the report's executive summary; and its method of tabulating deaths by county of residence (Appendix E), the frame within which any county figure must be read.
2. South Bend section of this history — the 988 lifeline's Indiana frame (House Bill 1468 of 2021; the live date of 16 July 2022; the launch-era call centers) and the county crisis center of 2023, cross-referenced here in a line each as briefed.
3. The TeenScreen entry of this section — the 2004 Penn High School death as the case record documents it, the one local episode printed, at its documented size.