Illinois Mental Health Map

Suicide rates are pooled across 2018–2022 to smooth out year-to-year noise in smaller counties, and the National Center for Health Statistics still suppresses any county with too few deaths in that window to report reliably (shown here as "data suppressed"). That is a privacy safeguard, not a sign those counties are doing better. It just means the count was small enough that publishing it could risk identifying individuals.

25 of Illinois's 102 counties have zero SAMHSA-listed mental health facilities within their borders. Menard County has the highest pooled point estimate for suicide rate in the state, 27.3 per 100,000, and no listed facility of its own. With only 18 deaths behind that estimate, though, its 95% confidence interval runs from 15.6 to 44.3, wide enough that Menard isn't statistically distinguishable from several other counties. That zero, unlike the rate, isn't an estimate. It is, however, an undercount by design: a facility only appears here if it is both licensed by its state's Substance Use Agency and responded to that year's national services survey, so a real, operating facility can be absent simply because it skipped the survey, or because it's licensed on a track this directory doesn't cover. Solo private-practice therapists are never eligible at all. Spot-checking DuPage County's own listings turns up the providers you'd expect: Central DuPage Hospital, AdventHealth, Endeavor Health, Rogers Behavioral Health, and Compass Health Center. So the major institutional providers do seem to come through; smaller and solo practices are the likelier gap. One wrinkle worth flagging: SAMHSA often lists a facility under its parent health system's name rather than the name people actually know. Linden Oaks Hospital in Naperville, for instance, is filed under "Endeavor Health," so a name search would miss it; the map above shows both names together for exactly this reason.

The naive correlation between suicide rate and facilities-per-100,000 across all counties is actually slightly positive (Pearson r = 0.28), which looks backwards at first glance. That's a denominator artifact, not a hidden silver lining: in a county of a few thousand people, one small clinic already produces a large per-capita rate, so a tiny rural county with a single facility can outscore Cook County on this measure without anything close to Cook's real capacity. A cleaner comparison avoids per-capita rates in small counties altogether: the 16 counties with zero listed facilities and a reportable suicide rate average 17.7 per 100,000, versus 15.6 in counties with at least one facility. That's a real, if modest, gap between presence and absence of any care infrastructure at all.

Suicide rate 10.0 per 100,000 (95% CI: 9.1–10.9), the lowest frequent-mental-distress rate of any Illinois county at 13.7%, and an uninsured rate of 7.1%, all better than the state as a whole. DuPage also has 32 listed mental health facilities, the third most of any county. On a per-capita basis that only ranks 52nd of 102, squarely middle of the pack. That's the same small-county denominator effect described above, working in the opposite direction here: a large, well-served county's real capacity doesn't show up as an extreme rate the way a rural county's one clinic does.