Suicides have surged by one third in the US in less than a decade, a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reveals.

Public health officials have been warning that the mental health of Americans is spiraling as more and more adults, teens and children report struggling with anxiety, depression and thoughts of their own lives.

The most dramatic increases in suicide deaths were among native people in the US, although the majority of people in the US who committed suicide in 2017 were white men - and the gap between male and female suicides is narrowing.

Given the recent history of suicide in the US, experts say the latest data is alarming, but hardly a surprise.

No increase in suicide deaths was so dramatic as that among American Indian and Alaska Native women (AIAN), which surged by 139% between 1999 (blue) and 2017 (green)

According to data on causes of death, despair is hanging thick over the US.

Last week, a Commonwealth Fund report revealed that these 'deaths of despair' have hit a record high in the US.

The rate of drug overdose deaths continues to climb at the heels of the opioid epidemic and alcohol related deaths are up by 37 percent, according to that report.

And suicides - which are often underestimated, in part because intentional overdoses get ruled accidental - are up by 33 percent, according to the latest numbers from the CDC's data arm, the National Center for Health Statistics.

In 2017, 22.4 out of every 100,000 men that died in the US took their own lives - an increase of nearly 26 percent over 1999's male suicide rate.

As has historically been the case, fewer women committed suicide, but the increase over the last decade was more substantial.

'We know that females attempt suicide three- to four- times as frequently as as males, but die less often, [in part] because they use less lethal means,' explains Dr Jonathan Singer, Board President at the American Association of Suicidology.

But the recent increase 'raises the question...are more females attempting suicide and dying or the same percentage attempting but using more lethal means?' he asks.

For every 100,000 women that died in 2017, 6.1 died by suicide, a tragic increase of over 50 percent since 1999.

In absolute terms, the greatest number of people that die every year are white men, but suicide claims an astonishing and disproportionate number of Native men, a graph shows

Suicide was particularly devastating to the population of American Indian or Alaskan Native women that year.

Marking a 139 percent increase in these deaths, 11 out of every native women that died that year committed suicide.

Among Native American men, 33.8 out of every 100,000 deaths were suicides.

'We have to as a country acknowledge the level of distress and suffering in American Indian and Alaska Native communities and see it as a national health priority,' says Dr Singer.

'Indigenous communities have the highest rates [of suicide] in many countries around the world.

'We see it in Canada, Australia and New Zealand...it's the sequela of colonialization.

'And they demonstrate remarkable resilience, given all the systematic efforts the US government made to eliminate an entire group.'

Yet, in the US, we tend to lump disparate groups together and take a uniform approach to suicide prevention and all aspects of mental health care.

'We need to develop culturally relevant suicide prevention strategies and it's incredibly important as rates of suicides appear to be continuing to increase across all racial and ethnic groups.'

High though the rates of suicide and increases are among all these groups, Dr Singer says they numbers don't fully capture what it means for the lives of the individuals that die by it or their families.

'Behind every statistic there's a tear, and there's a lot of tears in these numbers and at the same time, there are many stories these numbers can't tell,' he says.