With an understanding of the factors that may drive or protect against suicide and how they interact with physiological systems, we now turn to a discussion of what is known about suicide generally in the United States, specifically among various demographic groups. Suicide claimed 45,979 American lives in 2020, and US suicide rates have, until recently, increased while any other countries’ rates decreased. This chapter highlights what is known about the demographics of suicide in terms of age, race and ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity, as well as geography and location. We also highlight the limitations of this knowledge given that many diverse subgroups are aggregated into higher-order categories, small sample sizes limit knowledge of certain groups, and that many intersecting identities have been overlooked. While a single chapter is unable to cover all aspects of intersecting identities, attempts are made to highlight how intersections and multiple marginalization can compound suicide risk.

We present a model and review research supporting the proposal that children’s temperamental negative reactivity and effortful control in early and middle childhood mediates and moderates the effects of experiences of family contextual stress and adversity on children’s developing coping strategies, and in turn, adjustment problems. Evidence suggests that family contextual risk contributes to increases in negative emotionality and decreases in effortful control, which in turn predict greater reliance on avoidant coping and less use of active strategies. Further, negative emotionality and lower effortful control increase the likelihood that family contextual risk factors predict greater use of avoidant coping. We highlight evidence that flexible use of active and avoidant coping may be key to children’s adjustment in response to experiences of family risk. We also examine the effects of protective family contexts in promoting effective, flexible coping. In addition, we emphasize the need for more complex models that take intersecting racial, cultural, and gender identities into account in understanding the effects of temperament and family context on children’s coping and the implications of different coping strategies for children’s adjustment.