Someone once told me that all active alcoholics are suicidal—they’re just pulling the trigger really, really slowly. I suppose that’s true. But not everyone is so slow and scarily, the group of trigger pullers seems to be widening. According to a study just released by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), the US is actually witnessing its highest suicide rate in 30 years. From 1999 to 2014, suicides spiked 24% between men and women in every age group between 10 and 75.
Counting Down to Zero
Data reveals that in 2014 alone, 13 of every 100,000 Americans took their own lives. What’s worse is that the number has been rising 2% every year in the last decade. That’s 42,773 Americans who died from suicide in 2014, making it the 10th leading cause of death for all ages.
A Washington Post article tried to make sense of the findings, pointing the finger in several different directions: “Last decade’s severe recession, more drug addiction, ‘gray divorce,’ increased social isolation, and even the rise of the Internet and social media may have contributed to the growth in suicide,” it said. In the same article, Julie A. Phillips, a Rutgers professor who studies suicide demographics, also considered how unfulfilled expectations play a role. “People [were]growing up with a certain expectation…and the Great Recession and other things have really changed that,” she said. “Things aren’t panning out the way people expect. I feel for sure that has had an effect.”
The connection between economic hardship and suicide is nothing new, either. A 2015 study explored whether suicides among middle-aged Americans were connected to financial crises, while another study tied the two as far back as 1928, finding that suicide numbers are typically the highest when the economy is at its worse. (Here’s an eye-opening history lesson: the Great Depression’s suicide rate was nearly 70% higher than 2014.) The CDC has pinned some of the recent suicide spikes on home foreclosures and evictions.
Then There’s The Way I Did It
Before I got sober, my so-called suicide attempts weren’t grand or elaborate like suicides are supposed to be. No, I was just your garden-variety alcoholic who felt that life owed me something, blotting out my hopes and expectations with wine, vodka and whatever else I could find. I’d like to think everyone on the planet has had the fantasy of suicide flash through their brain at least once. When I was drinking, though, thinking of it was as much a fantasy as it was a reflex. Someone hurt my feelings? I’ll just kill myself. Someone caught me in a lie? I’ll just kill myself. It honestly made me feel better—the thought that I’d be getting even with other people through me not being around anymore. Then they’ll all be sorry.
Whenever I got really down on myself, I’d actually write suicide notes. And believe me: I really threw myself into them. The hours I wasted trying to write the perfect suicide note are mind-boggling. I don’t know how many letters I’d draft while blind drunk, only to pass out or get interested in something else midway through. I remember wiping tears away as I said goodbye to everything and everyone. The next morning, I’d see these walls of words in Microsoft Word staring back at me and I’d wonder what madman wrote them. Drinking baited self-pity like the goat they used in Jurassic Park to summon the T-Rex. In the end, I was never serious about it. Sadly, to an increasing degree, many other people are.
Prevention: Where Do We Even Start?
The pace of suicide has nearly doubled in a very short period of time. However, to me, the most unsettling part of the data might be that suicide clearly knows no bounds. Sally Curtin, a NCHS statistician, told CNN that the findings are challenging on multiple levels: “If it were just one particular group, you could say ‘that is where we need to focus,’” she said. Instead, the numbers are up almost uniformly across the board. The greatest increases were seen between girls aged 10 to 14 (that number has tripled between 1999 and 2014) and women aged 45 to 64 (up 63%). Across racial and ethnic groups, American Indians and native Alaskans saw the biggest spikes in suicide: women there saw an 89% increase while men saw 38%. (The Washington Post was quick to note that those populations are “much smaller than other ethnic groups in the United States.”) The only “bright” spots in the CDC’s otherwise bleak summary is that rates declined for black men, as well as men and women over 75.
Still, it’s difficult to pinpoint any one demographic group as a natural starting point for prevention efforts. Nearly every area in every age group saw an increase in suicide. The findings showed a rising trend in middle-aged white people—especially those with less education in rural areas. “This is part of the larger emerging pattern of evidence of the links between poverty, hopelessness and health,” said Robert D. Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard. By zeroing in on the underlying despair in those areas, he suggests, maybe prevention efforts could succeed.
So What Do We Do with This Info?
Studies like this are as insightful as they are confounding. While most experts seem to be collectively scratching their heads about the findings, they all seem to agree that suicide prevention needs an overhaul. In a New York Times piece on the findings, Dr. Jane Pearson, chairwoman of the National Institute of Mental Health’s Suicide Research Consortium, weighed in: “We have more and more effective treatments, but we have to figure out how to bake them into health care systems so they are used more automatically. We’ve got bits and pieces, but we haven’t really put them all together yet.”
In fact, the shifting nature of suicide methods underscores just how difficult it is to tailor prevention. Firearms and pill overdoses used to be the most common suicide methods, though CDC data now shows that suffocation was up 89% between 1999 and 2014. Further, the method was up an incredible 157% for white women. As experts struggle to understand this trend, suffocation may be attractive simply because it’s accessible to anyone. NCHS statistician Sally Curtin also noted that “the Internet can be a double-edged sword. Prevention materials can be widely disseminated, but also you can just Google ‘suicide.’ It’s just very different how much information we have at our fingertips.”
The CDC findings are nothing short of tragic but, in my opinion, the real tragedy would be the inability to do anything with what we know.
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