Elsewhere in this thread someone was citing the CDC and it was a lot. Looking it up myself, 48,824 total in 2024, and 11,453 were by suffocation (including hanging, but not just hanging), so that's 23.5%. Suicide rate for Black Americans is about 8.7 per 100k, Black population is about 51.6 million (or 516 100ks) so figure 4489 completed suicides per year. If the number carries, that's 1055 by suffocation. But a paper by Choi et al from 2022 seems to say Black people are about 10% less likely to use this method than White people, so maybe it's closer to 950. A paper by Yau and Paschall from 2018 gives trees as the most popular anchor points for suicide by hanging, though that is a bare plurality at 9.7%. Still, Yau says 90.7% of suicide by suffocation is hanging, and from my look at the numbers that's 8.8% of suicide by suffocation. So based on all that, if 950 Black Americans commit suicide by suffocation per year, we'd expect about 83.6 to do so by hanging themselves from a tree. Also there are known patterns of physical trauma that one will typically see in a body when someone deliberately hangs themself vs when this is done as an attack on a person (Kryezi 2022 mentions some). None of this is to say that every death we believe is a suicide actually is, but this particular method is not so rare or hard to identify that even half a dozen a month would seem improbable.