US suicide rates continue to rise
This is depressing news:
Suicide in the United States has surged to the highest levels in nearly 30 years, a federal data analysis has found, with increases in every age group except older adults. The rise was particularly steep for women. It was also substantial among middle-aged Americans, sending a signal of deep anguish from a group whose suicide rates had been stable or falling since the 1950s.
The suicide rate for middle-aged women, ages 45 to 64, jumped by 63 percent over the period of the study, while it rose by 43 percent for men in that age range, the sharpest increase for males of any age. The overall suicide rate rose by 24 percent from 1999 to 2014, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, which released the study on Friday
Rates increased sharply for girls 10-14 as well, and the ethnic group with the highest increase was American Indians, followed by white middle-aged women. Black men were the only ethnic group with a decrease.
Those statistics are all about increase vs. decrease rather than absolute numbers, however. A caveat is that 1999, the start year, was a low year for suicides. But the rates have been steadily increasing since then, so it seems to be a real effect. The other thing I need to point out is that even though the rates among women increased more than among men, men have a much higher suicide rate than women:
There are theories about why this general increase is happening, although no one knows for sure:
The data analysis provided fresh evidence of suffering among white Americans. Recent research has highlighted the plight of less educated whites, showing surges in deaths from drug overdoses, suicides, liver disease and alcohol poisoning, particularly among those with a high school education or less. The new report did not break down suicide rates by education, but researchers who reviewed the analysis said the patterns in age and race were consistent with that recent research and painted a picture of desperation for many in American society.
“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…
This is sobering, as well:
Though suicide rates for older adults fell over the period of the study, men over 75 still have the highest suicide rate of any age group ”” 38.8 per 100,000 in 2014, compared with just four per 100,000 for their female counterparts.
When you look at the charts, you might notice something interesting about that:
You can easily see that spike for middle-aged women and for older men. But notice that both women and men over 75 had suicide rates even higher in 1999 than recently, the only category with that pattern. Has growing old become less depressing in the 21st Century for both sexes, while being middle-aged has become more so (especially for women)? Or are the differences generational?
Sex, booze, mind control, organism based cults, what do people expect?
All of this has come to pass before, check out the homo erotic wine vessels of Ancient Rome or Ancient Mayan/Aztec/Incan civs.
Probably same deal with Soddom and Gomorrah. Prosperity has that effect on humans. Then they start killing themselves, probably way before anybody else tries to put divine punishment on them. They Punish themselves first. Evil by evil, evil to evil, just as a gaystapo activist is punished by a fist swipe by a Black Panther racist that hates homos, except when he is in jail. Black thugs call that “polar bear” hunting or some version of the kind if gay + white.
I don’t make judgments based on statistics, although statisticians do that as part of their stock and trade. I make judgments from derivations of true and first principles. Deductions, rather than looking at a data and trying to reverse engineer it back to true principles. Although that is what scientific methods do, that kind of reverse engineering.
There’s also abortions, feminism, white ghettoes, femi nazis that destroy families and make white men hate themselves, and so on and so forth. This “trashing” of the American culture is not merely political, so to speak. It was always about more than politics. It was about destroying or inverting beauty, ethics, metaphysics, epistemology even. Not merely about politics, which is one layer derived from ethics but below beauty.
Transformation is complete transformation only when you subvert and transform all the layers. If you allow people “any space” to be free or safe… then they refuse to be transformed. They have a safe space to retreat to. Close off that space, push them into the sea, and watch.
I always assumed that this would happen with the Baby Boomer cohort.
dying is the best thing that can happen to me
i had more of a post but nothing is getting through
i have been negated since bronx science
no school
no promotions
no help
so much to others no loans
sis has 6 houses, we cant get one
wife has to be barren
and more
but the spaminator will get it so i cant comment
http://afsp.org/about-suicide/suicide-statistics/
Men die by suicide 3.5x more often than women
White males accounted for 7 of 10 suicides in 2014
The rate of suicide is highest in middle age – white men in particular.
In 2014, the highest suicide rate (19.3) was among people 85 years or older. The second highest rate (19.2) occurred in those between 45 and 64 years of age. Younger groups have had consistently lower suicide rates than middle-aged and older adults. In 2014, adolescents and young adults aged 15 to 24 had a suicide rate of 11.6.
In 2014, the highest U.S. suicide rate (14.7) was among Whites and the second highest rate (10.9) was among American Indians and Alaska Natives (Figure 5). Much lower and roughly similar rates were found among Hispanics (6.3), Asians and Pacific Islanders (5.9), and Blacks (5.5).
[the priveleged are the highest rate and the oppressed have the lowest rates… ]
Median household income has declined steadily, almost monotonically, since 1999, which probably explains the suicide trend. It’s important not to be fooled by GDP increases or unemployment decreases: large numbers of people have gotten steadily poorer since 1999.
Break up of core families. Dwindling direct social interaction. Growth of social media which facilitates anonymous meaness. Twenty-four hour news cycles that feature only disaster and despair. Declining spirituality.
Have I missed anything?
Wife has become nearly addicted to the weather channel, which provides precious little weather forecasting in between disaster scenes; e,g., tornadoes, floods, earth quakes, hurricanes. It cannot be healthy to watch so much of this.
Sad statistics.
There is a pessimism that exists that is not materially justified in the US – still arguably the best country by far by several measures, and one of the best times to be living, so is not really as bad as people perceive.
Part of it comes with the human condition as we age. And we have a Baby Boomer cohort arriving at their “twilight years”.
Perhaps partly explains the “psychosis” behind the rally behind Trump.
There is a pessimism that exists that is not materially justified in the US — still arguably the best country by far by several measures, and one of the best times to be living, so is not really as bad as people perceive.
Spiritual health and ethics has little to nothing to do with your bank account and “materialistic” goods.
Something to keep in mind. Evil vs good isn’t about who has the best bank account and income or living standards.
As the song goes, “I hope I die before I get old.”
I sympathize with the increase in suicides in older people, especially older men. There are a lot of diseases that are 100% fatal and 100% progressive which would tempt even me to take the express lane out. Term life insurance is expired, and most whole life insurance is paid up and won’t exclude suicides anyway, so there’s no financial incentive to make the suicide an accident.
The general increase in people committing suicide shouldn’t be too surprising. It’s a natural consequence of nihilism as the moral standard. If life is only worth living when you’re happy and when things are going your way, and if life is all there is and there’s nothing more, why not end it?
The US is in the middle of the pack for advanced economies. The highest suicide rates are in terrible parts of the world, and the lowest rates interestingly are in terrible Arabian parts of the world. The highest national suicide rates among women (Guyana, Mozambique, Nepal) are right around the average rates for men.
Art, have you ever considered therapy?
Kentucky Packrat, you sum up both sides of the coin quite well.
Nihilism is a good description for the direction that society is traveling at an accelerated pace.
I am happy to be 80, despite the aches, pains and limitations, and feel that I still serve a purpose within the family; if not in the larger society. However, if one of those progressive or debilitating diseases caught up with me, it could become a moral dilemma. Would it serve my loved ones better to make a voluntary exit, or to see it through? I expect that they would say the latter–unless it lasted too long, and became too agonizing to watch. Of course, many times those situations sneak up on one, and by the time it is recognized there are really no choices.
Less work, more time to think. More time to think, means more time to worry. More worrying creates negative thinking patterns, resulting in more suicide.
Lets say it’s the 1850s, and you really had to struggle to feed your family and survive, would you really have time to ruminate about your existence? If you are busy trying to survive, there’s not much time left to do much else.
God knew the importance of work:
Whoever works his land will have plenty of bread, but he who follows worthless pursuits lacks sense. – Proverbs 12:11
The soul of the sluggard craves and gets nothing, while the soul of the diligent is richly supplied.
– Proverbs 13:4
You shall eat the fruit of the labor of your hands; you shall be blessed, and it shall be well with you.
– Psalms 128:2
Sweet is the sleep of a laborer, whether he eats little or much, but the full stomach of the rich will not let him sleep.
– Ecclesiastes 5:12
Etc.
God intended for people to work. Work is good for the soul and the mind.
Progressive confusion. Perpetual confusion.
The female chauvinists’ dysfunctional revolution highlighted by reactive and planned parenthood accelerated its progress.
Avoiding reconciliation of moral and natural imperatives through State-establishment of a pro-choice or selective principles religion (i.e. “church”) has consequences.
Conflating logical domains (i.e. science, philosophy, fantasy, and faith) probably didn’t help to secure a firm foothold in reality.
I have to wonder whether some of the women are just realizing that you can’t have it all, and that is a huge disappointment.
K-E,
It’s not work per se, it’s something that the individual finds worthwhile with which to invest ourselves. We need purpose. Work is just one of many possible avenues. Here for example, in this blog, neo has found one.
During the 1800s and early 1900s, a number of Indian Schools were established by white people of various levels of well-meaningness. In the history museum in Santa Fe, there is a poster in which one woman described her experiences: loosely quoting, ‘the objective of the school was to make us ashamed–of our language, of our clothing, of our religion, of our customs.’
Surely the aftermath of this systematic cultural destruction has something to do with the very high American Indian suicide rates.
I’m sure that not *all* the Indian Schools sought to inculcate this kind of shame as to one’s heritage. But isn’t the quoted passage a perfect description of what most Leftist elites…and some Right elites…have sought to do to the common American culture in general, and to the “white working class” in particular?
Art – That wasn’t meant as an insult or anything. And I don’t mean to push this. Your comments can have an OCPD vibe to them, and OCPD is very hard to self-diagnose.
I would say what Neo is doing is ‘work.’
My child is a worrier. Just born that way. This child discovered that when working even at a part-time, nothing job the mind is occupied and there is less time for worrying.
Could be any kind of work: gardening, cleaning, writing, fixing something. Just doing something productive.
She couldn’t do it so well, were it merely work.
Painting is only ‘work’ for those who have failed to master technique. The more creativity at play, the less work is involved.
Some form of fear lies at the heart of natural worriers. The distraction of being productive can certainly act as a temporary palliative but that merely treats the symptom.
Nick
I would judge that Art doesn’t get help from others because he doesn’t trust them. Being tied to a pension in Academia surrounded by feminists and Leftists. He’s tried to branch out before, but the Left stopped him and locked him back in the closet prison, sometimes literally.
And many therapists are Leftists to begin with, so them helping… well that’s not guaranteed.
Major Hassan certainly “helped” the PTSD vets at Ft Hood, right.
As for work vs passion. Skills require focus, whether they are work or hobbies doesn’t matter. Too much work to enrich your social betters, that isn’t a good thing either, which is why Christians have the Sabbath day, supposedly to rest and reflect on their spiritual nature and growth. Overwork yourself and you end up like the Japanese, and like the Americans too.
@Ymarsakar – what you say is true to the extent that “money doesn’t buy happiness”, but you miss the point by focusing on that single aspect. What makes the US great is well beyond the material.
One could write a book about what makes the US stand out, even now. Just one example… There is opportunity for self-actualization, well beyond most countries, right here in the US… it is rather well beyond the country’s entire history.
Another… We really don’t have the existential crisis, where there was actual risk of starvation and of providing for one’s family like there existed only less than 100 years ago.
Too many people have the mindset that one can only imagine existed in times long ago, like during the Weimar, where they think there is a need to “blow it all up” and start over.
We are nowhere near those conditions.
It is a nonsensical risk to take for minimal gain.
Yes, there are problems to be resolved, but putting in some potential tyrant is hardly a way to solve them.
But, perhaps, the more the big problems are solved/solvable for people, the more importance the lesser problems gain.
In other, less fortunate countries, they derisively refer to this thinking / view point as “1st World Problems”.
No doubt this type of thinking contributes to any depression some feel, perhaps ultimately leading to the stats mentioned above.
‘the objective of the school was to make us ashamed—of our language, of our clothing, of our religion, of our customs.’
What better way to describe what is being done to children in public education – most especially white, or sort of at a squint white children?
If an authority figure set about to absolutely destroy a child’s self-confidence, their assurance about themselves, their entire image of who they are and what they and their ancestors and loved ones stand for – generally this is called child abuse, when done one-off and personally. So what is it called when it is done to a whole generation of children, in the confines of a public school?
A bit of history. In 1954 I left school with a bag of clothing and $25 in my pocket. I had a job in Salt Lake City. I hitched a ride with a friend and reported for my job. From that day (June 15th, 1954) I was never unemployed except for a thirty day strike at my airline. I often worked two jobs and always made enough money to support my family -although mostly at a lower middle class standard of living. Little by little I progressed in pay and living standards. But I had my eye on old age. I was planning and setting aside what I could to sustain a retirement that might last 30 or more years. Here I am, 64years later, able to look back and realize that I managed through hard work, planning, and good luck (Yes, luck played a big part – but some of it I made by being in the right place at the right time.) to have achieved the “American Dream” of coming from a near destitute state to being a responsible, tax-paying, independent citizen who has contributed more to society than I ever believed possible.
I have a daughter who is near 50. She is better educated than I ever was, has always worked hard, played by the rules, been entrepreneurial, and done the right thing. As a mental health therapist, she has done a lot of good for humanity. We have had people tell us how much she helped them to improve their lives. In spite of all that, she has been unable to save the kind of money she will need to retire. Fortunately, she is in a profession where she can keep working as long as her health allows. But she is worried about being unable to attain the “American Dream” of financial stability for her old age. She also works with many people who are in despair about their futures. Those people in that age group have seen the “American Dream” fade from view. Suicide may be their answer.
There have been many good comments about the devaluation of the family, the feminist movement’s hostility to men, the loss of secure jobs, drug and alcohol addiction, lack of responsibility, etc., etc. I want to add a couple of things that I think have destroyed the “American Dream” as it once existed – at least for those of us who are now in our 70s and older.
Environmentalism. Who is not in favor of a clean environment? However, the environmental movement was seized by more than good meaning people who wanted clean air and water and nice National Parks. Whether they are Communists or just extreme ideologues about the environment doesn’t matter. What does matter is that they have destroyed industries and jobs wholesale going all the way back to the 80s.
Coal mining is just the most recent. Logging, fishing, mining of all kinds, farming, irrigation for farming, cattle and sheep ranching, oil and gas drilling, small businesses, construction, nuclear power, automobiles, and manufacturing have all been under attack from the environmentalists and have declined as a part of our economy since the 80s. What is very important about this is that all these activities create wealth. Wealth is not created by lawyers, government agencies, banks, insurance companies, charities, newspapers, TV networks, or other such activities that just move the wealth around. If we want to be economically sound, with a growing economic pie, we have to go back to encouraging wealth creating activities. Only then will we have enough jobs for those willing to work, save, and plan for their future. Only by stopping the excesses of the environmentalists will this happen.
The second thing is we have to revive part of the idea of JFK’s: “Ask not what the government can do for you.” I would rephrase the second part to, “Ask yourself what you can do to become a responsible citizen who supports him/herself, his/her family, and works to make the country stronger both economically and spiritually.” Our young people today are not being pointed toward a life of independence gained through education, work, and spiritual development. Life today is too much about Facebook, Twitter, and bling. It does resemble the decline of the Roman Empire.
Two days ago I was at a city council meeting in our small village. The subject was land use planning and zoning. There was a parade of advocates beseeching the city to change its zoning regulations to allow more low income housing and more substance treatment centers. Many were employees of NGO charities who have access to government funds. They want the city to allow more “low income” housing so they can get government money to build and manage it. I was amazed. This is a shadow industry that caters mostly to illegal immigrants, the homeless, and substance abusers. At this time we have a few illegal immigrants and substance abusers around but no homeless people like you see in the major cities. These “advocates” want to move the homeless out of our major cities into small bergs because they believe we small town Americans should do our part. I’m not feeling the guilt I guess I’m supposed to. It was an eye opening experience as to how our culture is being affected by the do-gooders.
I’m still optimistic that things can change, but right now I don’t see it happening short of a national wake up call. I thought 9/11 was such a call. I was wrong. What will it take?
I’m not saying he should blindly trust therapists, any more than a person should blindly trust bridges – but they’re still a good way to get across the river.
K-E Says:
April 22nd, 2016 at 3:00 pm
Lets say it’s the 1850s, and you really had to struggle to feed your family and survive, would you really have time to ruminate about your existence? If you are busy trying to survive, there’s not much time left to do much else.
Hmmm …
See this book:
Wisconsin Death Trip
Suicide was then a favored exit strategy.
I’m not saying he should blindly trust therapists, any more than a person should blindly trust bridges — but they’re still a good way to get across the river.
For someone with a good mastery of verbal linguistics learning methods, sure.
There is a pessimism that exists that is not materially justified in the US
How am I missing the point, Big Maq, when the point I was contending with chiefly concerned itself with materialistic benefits? Of course now you say there were other things involved but back then:
There is a pessimism that exists that is not materially justified in the US
So material justifications are not the same as spiritual justifications to my eyes. Even though you say there are more reasons, it’s something you brought up later and was not your original focus. You focus on the material benefits as for why it isn’t bad in the US. I focus on prosperity and wealth not being connected to spiritual good or evil. If anything, people become more evil the more wealth they inherit. It’s a problem of Envy so to speak.
So what is it called when it is done to a whole generation of children, in the confines of a public school?
I would call that brainwashing and mind control. The Japanese integrated Okinawa (culturally they are more Chinese) into Japan by blocking the Okinawan language in schools. It’s a kind of forced collectivism so to speak, that is different from the free will integration Americans were used to.
@Ymarsakar
“Not materially” also means “substantially or considerably”. Yes, it includes monetarily or with possessions, in this context. That is part of it, but not all of it.
After my second response, it should have been clear, even though I didn’t specifically point out the literal meaning.
Great comments by David Foster, Sgt. Mom and JJ. Especially the parts about always being told how “bad” we are for being white males.
There is opportunity for self-actualization, well beyond most countries, right here in the US… it is rather well beyond the country’s entire history.
True, Big Maq, you did bring up a virtue and benefit in the US. Which is why when Americans allowed the state to harass and discriminate and extort money from Christian bakers and other small businesses, this, along with a bunch of other things, negated that spiritual self-actualization.
Being execute at Waco 1 and Waco 2 also helps.
In that context, if you believe that the spiritual rewards are just as great or beneficial, do you not think that the US of today has already eliminated its state of virtue through abuse of powers?
As for me, I find it hard to believe a country can point out to some beneficial opportunities, while tyrannizing the people for evil. In many instances, sure, some people in totalitarian countries have benefits and good lives, but that doesn’t erase the evil either.