Suicide rates are rising in America, and in other rich countries
IN GRAPHICS: Read more about America's rising suicide rates
EACH year the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a federal agency, adds up the causes of death noted on coroners’ certificates. It is the most melancholy of lists, from heart disease at the top to scarlet fever at the bottom. Suicide usually hovers around number ten, prominent but not exactly startling. On April 22nd the CDC sorted the numbers another way, picking out the suicides and examining trends in self-destruction. Viewed this way, the data are alarming: America is in the grip of a sustained raise in the suicide rate across all age groups and for both sexes. From 1999 to 2014, the suicide rate rose by 24%. The numbers are adjusted to take account of ageing. Men shoot themselves; women take poison. There has been a rise in suffocation and strangulation.
The finding fits with other melancholy ones from economists, including Anne Case and Angus Deaton, who have pointed to declining life-expectancy for poor whites, and Raj Chetty of Stanford and his colleagues at Harvard and elsewhere, who show how inequality correlates with illness. Everything seems to point in the same direction, to a national malaise, challenging the idea that America’s story is one of inexorable progress. Yet some caution is order. The suicide rate declined steadily from 1986 until 2000, the date the CDC paper takes as its starting point. What is happening in America is a return to the mid-1980s rather than a leap into some lethal, dystopian future.
It is also worth noting that a similar pattern can be seen some other countries. Using a database from the OECD, and filling in a few gaps from other sources, we have compared America’s suicide rates with those elsewhere. The OECD data do not correspond exactly with those produced by the CDC because of the different ways their respective statisticians adjust the raw numbers for ageing. But they show that America’s suicide rate comes out considerably lower than those of France or Belgium. And the recent uptick is mirrored in Britain and the Netherlands, among other countries.
The rise since 2007, when the financial crisis got under way, adds weight to the idea that suicide studies are really just a branch of macroeconomics. But within the CDC numbers there is enough to suggest that the causes of the increase are more complicated than that. When plotted on a map, what researchers refer to as a “suicide corridor” runs from Montana in the north to New Mexico in the south, with Nevada to the west and Colorado to the east. The best explanation for this seems to lie in demography. Native Americans and non-Hispanic whites both have a higher propensity for suicide than other ethnic groups. The mountain West has plenty of both. The desert has also become a popular retirement destination for old bones. Surveyed by age, the group at the highest risk of committing suicide is not reckless young men but males aged 75 or over.
This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline "The saddest trend"
