“You’re sitting naked in a hotel room with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s?â€
“Yes.â€
“Is this maybe influencing your decision?â€
“Possibly.â€
That distressing inner exchange is from an article by Stephen Rodrick at Rolling Stone about the rising suicide rate among middle-aged and elderly white men, illustrated by the graph above from RealClearPolicy.
The article is upsetting but worth reading. It’s not just middle-aged white men. The homicide rate for young black men, after declining for a number of years, is rising as well. I think it’s clear we’re doing something wrong. I can’t think of a single case of people who had devoted their lives to acts of kindness, doing good to others, and faith has ever been driven to taking their own lives.
” I can’t think of a single case of people who had devoted their lives to acts of kindness, doing good to others, and faith has ever been driven to taking their own lives.”
I can think of plenty. Several nurses, a physician, people from church, military. What you are forgetting is that a lot of depression is endogenous, not really related to the quality of their lives, with no particular event(s) casting the depression. They just get depressed and dont know why it happens. Very hard to treat. Then there is that over group. Some of those are good, decent people who lead the life you described, but they end up alone and/or dealing with cancer pain.
What strikes me is the same issues we see her in PA. Substance abuse and lack of access to mental health care, and we generally have better access than they do out West or in the South. The other issue is guns. So much suicide is impulsive. A gun increases the chances that the impulse is fatal.
Steve
I will agree with your observation about mental health care. We are not dealing with mental illness appropriately.
Have you read The Pursuit of Loneliness? For many solitude is a choice which has severe repercussions as people age. As I said, I think we’re doing something wrong.
@steve
[…] The other issue is guns. […]
Off the top of my head, I can name half a dozen other ways, and if I give some more thought, I could name another half a dozen. Effectiveness is a big factor, and a small caliber, subsonic bullet to the head at the right angle is very effective. A semi-jacketed, hollow point bullet is another option.
TG- There dozens of effective ways to kill yourself. However, guns are extremely effective (lower failure rate that pills) and take essentially no preparation, if you have one available. Many of the other require preparation, at which point the impulse may be gone.
“Have you read The Pursuit of Loneliness? For many solitude is a choice which has severe repercussions as people age.”
No, should I? Besides the OR, I now have a lot of involvement with ICU care, hospice, pain services and the opioid problem. It is noticeable how many people at the end of life are essentially alone. I think a lot of that is due to smaller family sizes, some due to the discrepancies in male-female life expectancies. It is also, IMHO, often related to character pathologies on the part of those left alone. The chronic low grade alcoholic or other substance abuser. The chronically depressed (these people are just hard to be around sometimes). Other mental illnesses. Some of this is also related to fewer people active in churches. Our church has run its soup kitchen for many years, and many isolated elderly come in to see people as much as they do, maybe more, for the food. We are also swamped with requests for the pastoral group to help with people who dont have family. Wife spends a lot of time driving people to medical appointments. (Her niche.)
Steve
These are all things that I think we’re doing wrong as a society.
If the model is going to be that families take care of people in their old age, there need to be support systems for the kinds of values that would require. If the model is going to be that people are responsible for their own old age, ditto. If the model is going to be that the government is responsible, we’re going to see higher levels of taxation than anybody has ever imagined.
What we’re doing now, e.g. encouraging consumption, discouraging savings, encouraging solitude, not replacing the institutions that are collapsing with anything else, is nuts.