I am interested in the suicide rates per state for the last 5-10
years, specifically those that rated the highest.

I''m going to try to make a table here; I will give you the top few
states for each year that I found statistics for; this came from the
Lexis-Nexis Statistics page so I cannot refer it to you unless you
have access to a library that subscribes. If you do, you can just
enter "suicide rates" and pull up the full tables yourself.  Rates are
per 100,000 residents, in no particular order

State                1994              1996          2000

Alaska               20.0                19.8            20.0
Montana            18.5                 18.8           18.5
New Mexico       18.3                 18.6           18.3
Wyoming            22.5                 18.3          22.5
Oregon                16.6                16.2           16.6
Arizona               16.8                  16.4           18.8
Colorado            16.8                  18.2           16.8
Idaho                  17.7                    14.9           17.7
Nevada                23.4                  20.9            23.4
Utah                       15.3                  14.3          15.3
FL                              14.9               15.0          14.9
South Dakota         13.5                16.9           13.5
West Virginia          14.2                15.3          14.2
Arkansas                14.8                 12.9           14.8



If you are interested in worldwide suicide rates, this page lists them by country:
http://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/suiciderates/en/

This 1998 article talks about suicide rates in the world:
http://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/IASR/suicide-rates.htm

This site has some other links to statistics:
http://www.befrienders.org/suicide/statistics.htm

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Request for Answer Clarification by deerock-ga on 26 Apr 2005 18:35 PDT

can you access info for 2004 or 2005 as well?

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Clarification of Answer by jab-ga on 27 Apr 2005 06:19 PDT

The last year of data I can find is 2001:
http://www.census.gov/prod/2004pubs/03statab/vitstat.pdf 
 - p. 27 - this is a 2004/2005 publication, but the data shown are for
earlier years.

Good job finding the statistics that I was looking for. thanks.

The primary source for birth and death data is the National Center for
Health Statistics (NCHS) <http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/>.  The NCHS can
provide information on total deaths, and deaths by age, race, and sex
at the national, state, and county levels.  Their telephone number is
(301) 458-4636. 

I still have not found anything later than 2001. Perhaps a phone call
to the above number can get you some preliminary data that are not yet
available online.

I did find some death data for 2002 in National Vital Statistics
Reports, but not broken down by state.