Wyoming’s Mental Health Struggles: A Closer Look At Statistics

The Wyoming Department of Health put out their annual report looking at 2024 birth, death, marriage, and divorce records.

WDH Director Stefan Johansson said, “While not among Wyoming’s top causes of death, two specific areas of interest in our state continue to be suicide and overdose deaths. The tragic and unexpected nature of these deaths can have big impacts within our communities.”

Johansson said caution is necessary when reviewing these statistics. “It’s not realistic to describe changes in counts from one year to the next as trends. Our small population in Wyoming naturally leads to volatility in totals between years,” he said.

Among Wyoming’s resident deaths, there were 168 suicide deaths in 2024 compared to 156 in 2023, 155 in 2022, 190 in 2021, 182 in 2020 and170 in 2019.

Wyoming’s provisional data show about 88 percent of Wyoming’s resident suicide deaths in 2024 were among males. About 72 percent of suicide deaths involved firearms, roughly 12 percent involved hanging and more than 8 percent involved poisoning.

There were 97 overdose deaths recorded among Wyoming residents in 2024 compared to 120 in 2023, 110 in 2022, 98 in 2021, 90 in 2020 and 81 in 2019.

Among the reported overdose deaths in 2024, 62 percent were linked with illicit drugs, 31 percent with prescription drugs and 3 percent involved a combination. Opioids can be either prescription drugs or illicit drugs and were connected to 45 of the reported overdose deaths last year.

Methamphetamine was linked with 48 of the deaths and fentanyl was linked with 21. Because drug overdose deaths sometimes involve more than one drug, a single death is sometimes included in more than one category.

Read More: Wyoming Saw More Birth, Death and Marriage in 2024, and Less Divorce