The recent report by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about suicide rates in the United States is alarming in many respects, not least because they continue to rise despite widespread efforts to raise awareness of the problem and to combat it.
The CDC found that between 1999 and 2016, suicide rates increased in virtually all states and that suicide is now the 10th leading cause of death in the United States and one of only three — along with Alzheimer’s disease and drug overdoses — that are increasing. Put in individual terms, nearly 45,000 Americans age 10 or older died by suicide in 2016.
Vermont and New Hampshire were hardly immune to the trend. They were among a group of mostly rural states where the rates rose most sharply over the period, 49 percent in Vermont and 48 percent in New Hampshire.
Several surprising (at least to us) findings emerged from the CDC’s more detailed review of 2015 suicide data from the 27 states for which complete data was available in the CDC’s National Violent Death Reporting System.
Among them was that 54 percent of those who died by suicide in that year were not known to have any mental health conditions. While those who study suicide concluded long ago that it is rarely attributable to any single factor, the CDC researchers noted that prevention efforts largely focus on “identifying and referring suicidal persons to mental health treatment and preventing reattempts.” The limitations of that approach are apparent if no known mental health conditions exist in an individual.
The CDC said that other factors contributing to suicide include financial crises, declines in physical health, criminal or other legal problems, the loss of one’s home, and especially the end of intimate-partner relationships — in short, the kind of crises that many people experience at one time or another in life. What makes such crises end in self-destruction for some individuals but not for others is the tragic riddle of suicide. But it seems clear that we all need to pay close attention when family members, friends or co-workers are experiencing this kind of stress, even if they have never shown suicidal tendencies.
A larger issue that the report does not address is the background against which the increase in suicide rates is playing out. The period studied by the CDC coincided with the epidemic of opioid overdose deaths, both from prescription medications and illicit drugs. It also saw the internet evolve from novelty to ubiquity, ushering in an era of rapid technological change that is disrupting and often destroying settled patterns of economic, social, political and personal life, with all the upheaval that implies for the individual. It is fundamentally altering the way in which humans interact with one another and with the natural world.
When social media take the place of face-to-face contact, when digital connectivity allows people to work remotely (in the precise sense of the word) from home alone, when online shopping replaces the person-to-person kind, when nature is experienced virtually, if at all, the effect can be profoundly alienating.
It is not a great leap to speculate that suicide and opioid addiction are two different, tragic responses to this era of upheaval, with oblivion being the object of both.
Humans are by nature social animals and not meant to live in isolation from their fellows. But even as the digital age claims to promote connections among people, a strong case can be made that it also exalts, concentrates and echoes the individual’s thoughts and desires in ways that can be deeply unhealthy. As such, it undermines that sense of belonging to something larger than oneself that is a key to avoiding despair. As individuals, we all need to receive human affirmation; we also all need to provide it to others.