The silent epidemic of suicide in the United States
The National Center for Health Statistics recently released a major study, examining the national trends in suicide. The results are grim: The age-adjusted suicide rate in the United States increased a staggering 24 percent from 1999 to 2014. Increases were seen in every age group except for those 75 and above and in every racial and gender category except for black men. The national rate rose to 13 deaths per 100,000 people in 2014. Contrast that withhomicide, which killed 5.1 Americans per 100,000 in 2013. We instinctively fear the murderer hiding in the bushes,but we are at far greater risk from ourselves.
There’s another reason, I suspect, for the relative dearth of commentary on our suicide epidemic, a disturbing one:Suicide is concentrated among those whom our society values least. Take Native Americans, for example. That racial category saw the rate for men rise by 38 percent and for women, an unthinkable 89 percent. Not coincidentally, this group suffers in comparison with natural averages in a large number of metrics that consider quality of life, with poverty and substance abuse rampant. The Native American population, sad to say, does not attract a great deal of attention in the national media, with its relatively small population and concentration in rural states, leaving the group easily forgotten by media companies concentrated in urban areas.
Suicide has geographical components, too. Sociologist Matt Wray of Temple University coined the term “suicide belt” to describe the north-south band of western American states — Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, and Wyoming — that have unusually high suicide rates. This likely reflects the same underlying economic conditions that seem to contribute to suicide rates in general, with high rates of aging, single, unemployed men — and unusually high rates of gun ownership. Owning a gun is one of the most powerful predictors of suicide risk overall, for obvious reasons. For as much as the United States suffers from a gun murder rate far higher than most of the industrialized world, most gun deaths stem from suicide.