Armand Domalewski asks an important question, when he observes a quick decrease in teen and young adult suicide after 1994, which held until about 2008 and in 2017 exceeded its previous high:

The more important question, though, is what has been happening since 2007/2008.

Having graduated high school in 1993, I’d speculate that the drop in the ’90s had to do, most profoundly, with the lightening of the existential dread of nuclear war after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 combined with young adults’ trimming their Baby Boomer parents’ greater social excesses and gaining a general optimism for the future based on economic growth with the rise of information technology.

Corresponding with the elevation of Obama, efforts to revive existential dread based on the environment and to erase progress toward racial harmony, not to mention attacks on the economic freedom, reversed those trends.