Brendan Koerner delivers the sad news:
Despite all we've learned about human psychology over the past several decades, we seem unable to make much of a dent in America's overall suicide rate, which has remained remarkably stable over the past half-century. In fact, the rate of suicide attempts seems to have gone up over that time period; the rate of successful attempts has most likely held steady due to advances in emergency-room medicine. (Sparsely populated states such as Montana often have high suicide rates because people live so far from ERs.)