Suicide Rises Dramatically, Especially Among Men
May 3, 2013
THE New York Times reports staggering increases in suicide among the middle-aged, especially among men. The rate for middle-aged men jumped by almost 50 percent between 1999 and 2010. It rose to 27.3 deaths per 100,000 men, as compared to 8.1 deaths per 100,000 for women, which also represents an increase. Many of the commenters in the ensuing discussion blame the economy and the inability of men to provide for their families. As Congress ponders further increases in legal immigration and visas for foreign workers, the commenters tell stories of lost jobs, careers suddenly terminated, depleted savings and divorce.
One commenter writes:
My brother committed suicide last July. He had just turned 60. He lost his IT job in the Great Recession in 2008. Despite hundreds of resumes being sent out, and a lifetime of IT experience, he got few interviews and no job offers. He spent down his 401(k) and when he died the only thing he owned was a beat-up car. We later found out he had a lot of credit card debt, with which he had tried to keep himself afloat. After four years of no job offers, unemployment running out, having no health insurance, etc., his dignity was shot. He had lost hope of ever working again. How I wish he had not committed suicide; how I would give anything and everything to have him back.
Another says:
Why doesn’t the fact that, in America now …. males commit suicide at between 3 and 10 time the rate of females provoke more discussion of gender roles and expectations[?]
Yet another commenter argues that suicide is simply a legitimate way to avoid the hassles of old age:
We were brought up on the pleasure principle, instant gratification and eternal youth, so that when life is no longer enjoyable we will simple leave. It can be sad for those left behind, but I think it will finally be a life choice.
— Comments —
A reader writes:
Given the persistent malaise of the economy combined with the relentless moral decline in our times, I cannot say the NYT’s reporting an increase in the U.S. suicide rate, especially among “baby-boomers,” is very surprising. I have lost my job twice in the past 11 years, each time returned to work for less pay, and am now in foreclosure on our house, so the pressures described are not unfamiliar. And, of course, the unemployment figure of 8% that everyone quotes is just another federal lie. Based on a variety of sources, I believe it is more like 23%. (That must be why we need to import all those “guest” workers, increase H-1B visa quotes, and amnesty all the illegal aliens so their kin will hasten to join us: just the ticket to “get America moving again.”)
Nevertheless, should we not set these grim statistics alongside the abortion and illegitimacy rates as evidence of a society in deep moral crisis? I wish I knew how to change the direction. One thing I’m quite sure of is that there will be no economic salvation.
Eric writes:
I found this article timely, if gloomy. The comments are interesting, many people write of people they have known who have killed themselves after a divorce or loss of family support.
There is much to learn from this, if only we can learn it.
Karl D. writes:
This infuriates and touches me on several levels. I can’t help feel some anger towards these very people who are committing suicide. Granted, I don’t know them personally. But by and large they seem to be members of the Baby Boom generation, a generation which played a huge role in the mess in which we now find ourselves, a generation that grew up in a time when America was prosperous, traditional as well as racially and culturally homogenous. Yet they did all they could to destroy that America and are now reaping the rewards as well as dooming future generations to the hell they helped create. On a human level, I feel quite bad for these individuals because I see the despair in my own friends and family who are in their 50s, 60s and even 70s. But it is still a tough pill to swallow on a larger scale. Sorry, but I have a thing about Baby Boomers. They just really get under my skin.
Mary writes:
This is very sad news indeed and interestingly it ties directly to the TTH post about the abandoned homes in Europe, the devaluing of Christian artifacts and the destruction wrought in the 60s. The fact that baby boomers should despair in higher numbers than previous generations upon reaching middle age is not surprising for the simple fact that they were the first truly secular generation. When immediate gratification, coupled with the shattering of important human bonds through divorce and sexual license, bumps up against loss of youth and economic turmoil, the cumulative effect can be nothing but despair. Unless, of course, one’s natural instinct – one that has sustained mankind for time immemorial – is to turn one’s eyes to heaven and entreat the Almighty.
It’s hard to say if the baby boomers rejected what was given them or if they were never properly given what they needed. Either way, ignorance of the trancendent has been considered, until now, one of their triumphs. Maybe these sobering statistics will cause them to rethink what they have thrown away – tomorrow’s promise for today’s pleasure.
Winnie writes:
As the late, great Lawrence Auster distilled it, the logical end of living by “unprincipled exception” is self-annihilation.He often spoke of this in macro-terms, concerning Western Civilization. But clearly this self-annihilation is also the logical end on a micro-level, the human person. When a man becomes untethered from his culture, his community, his family, (and GOD), both through the destructive forces of the zeitgeist and through his own failure to recognize them and actively fight against destruction, what is to stop him from suicide? When personal error combines with all the outside forces of deconstruction imposed on Man, especially the white Western post-Judeo-Christian Man, what coherence binds him (bodily, spiritually, intellectually) and protects him? (Side-note: it’s not the empowered wymyn who will protect Man.)
G.K. Chesterton was also a brilliant observer of and commentator on modern skepticism. Like Mr. Auster, Chesterton wrote and thought and read his way out of the fog and into Catholicism – a practical and spiritual antidote to nihilism.
Please do not mistake my citation below as making light of suicide. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine these days that anyone who’s paying attention could not have experienced despair at the world at some point. On the contrary, suicide is tragic, but it can be viewed as a logical phenomenon, the result of the many conspiring layers of nihilism in which we find ourselves steeped.
Here’s what Chesterton had to say about suicide in Orthodoxy, Chapter V The Flag of The World:
The zeitgeist does have us sneer at the world. We sneer at all the bad things in the world but we also sneer at religion, at real sex, at commitment, masculinity, femininity, childhood, family, life, perseverance and so on. We are taught from the cradle that there is no Truth, that “I define my reality” and “I choose what is GOOD for ME.” But when realities clash and when the inevitable suffering and nothingness impose upon our gods of pleasure and “freedom,” the logical conclusion of our nurtured autonomy is suicide.
Laura writes:
What a terrific statement.
Anyone who has not experienced despair in a world so saturated with nihilism is either insensate and not fully alive or is preternaturally holy. Suicide is the logical answer. Ultimately, it is not about lost jobs or economic hardship. Those who have lost jobs and are experiencing economic pain can’t distract themselves. They can’t bury themselves in their work. They can’t buy things to give them a lift. They can’t cover up the emptiness.
Jewel writes:
One of the saddest things that has plagued my children’s generation is the many suicides. All of them were high school students. When my daughters were younger and more manipulative of my will (at least they tried to be), the suicide card was played. Only once. The moment they played the card by threatening to kill themselves, I would give them the lecture. It was pretty much the lecture Chesterton would have given, but without the beauty of his language. It went like this:
If you kill yourself because I wouldn’t give in to you, don’t think for a moment it’s over: You will be judged by God and He will ask you why you hated the gift of life, and why you threw it away. Do you really want to tell Him that it was to spite your parents?
If you kill yourself, you will have no obituary in the paper, your friends will not be allowed to say goodbye to you. I will have you cremated, so there will be no resting place, no marker, nothing.
You will spend an eternity in Hell.
I wonder how many parents are willing to give their kids this lecture, harsh as it is. I have a daughter with chronic and serious depression, and I can tell you that it is mostly due to the poor choices she has made in her life. She has made unserious attempts at ‘suicide,’ but it was really self-pity she was wallowing in and not truly a desire for death. I had given each of my daughters this speech, and when their friends found out, they were simply aghast. Their parents would never talk to them like this.
If you love your children, you will tell them this.
Laura writes:
Absolutely. A parent has the duty to tell children that suicide is evil. One reason why suicide has increased among the young is that suicides have been elevated to a position of sainthood. They are seen as victims, not murderers.
Julia writes:
My mother is one of those suicidal Baby Boomers. She made so many attempts I lost track. Often, she would wind up in the hospital. She is very well insured and got all the help money could buy, but it never stopped her. She threatened suicide even more times than she tried it.
Once, I went to visit her after a particularly devastating attempt. She was in restraints, tied to a bed in a psych ward, her arms bandaged from cutting her wrists. She was nearly unconscious from the overdose she had attempted and muttering to herself. I could not bear to look at her and fled the room, crying. I reached the elevator, still crying. On the way down, an elderly couple got on the elevator. The old lady looked at me and said, kindly, in broken English, “Dying…is hard.” She knew something was very wrong and she was trying to comfort me. I will never forget the kindness of that old lady.
I became almost callous towards my mother’s threats, out of self-protection. I learned not to be manipulated by any threats of suicide. The last time my father called to tell me my mother was making threats again, I hung up and called the police. They nearly broke the door down after my mother did not answer it immediately. They evaluated her on the spot and called an ambulance. I told her that every time I heard she was making a threat, I would call 911. We simply could not afford to do otherwise any more, as she was becoming far too manipulative, using the threat of suicide to control the family. Plus, there was always the risk she would actually succeed. It was the last time I ever heard her make a threat again, and to my knowledge, she has not made an attempt in a few years.
In many ways, I am motherless. No mother who does these things to her children can ever be trusted. I take the good with the bad and try to remember she cannot help herself. I am envious of women with normal mothers, who do normal things together, like go out to breakfast. I won’t read the article about the suicidal Baby Boomers. I have seen enough of it to know what they are capable of. The selfishness is unbelieveable.
Laura writes:
I am sorry for your suffering.
Teresa writes:
Interesting that only one commenter touched briefly the heart matter. That heart of this is “not being given what they needed.” We, baby boomers, didn’t spring from Hydra’s Head, but from parents.
But, lest, I point the finger at others, not realizing that three fingers point back at me, in doing so; I come back to the full realization that “the social problems, all of them, reside in me.” Until I’ve cleaned my own home, tended my own garden, hoed my own row, taken my own inventory, helped my neighbor, done the will of God in all that I do, cheerfully in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer; until I’ve done all that, and yet seen more to do in mending my own fences … I am the problem.
This is the month of May, the month of Our Lady. Our Lady at Fatima told the three children, “most souls go to hell because they have no one to pray for them.” I truly don’t know the disposition of souls who have committed suicide; unless, I want Our Lord’s counsel to fall upon me. Judge not, lest my judgement fall upon me.
Our Lady said time and again to each of us: pray and do our daily duty. My obligation is to pray for myself and others and do my daily duty of my state in life. That is sufficient meat for my soul and the spiritual health of the world.
Laura writes:
You may prefer to focus on your own life and to pray for those in distress, which is very important, but if no one publicly commented on the evil of suicide or taught parents to teach their children that suicide is sinful, the spiritual health of the world would be worse. The injunction to “judge not lest ye be judged” does not mean one should not admonish sinners or refrain from publicly defining right and wrong. We must judge too, though in individual cases, as Julia mentioned with regard to her mother, judgments should not be rash or without sympathy.
Hannon writes:
Your post and first wave comments focused on a number of aspects to the increased suicide rate of Americans. What went missing, as was predictably the case in the Paper of Broken Record story and comments there, is the fact that the increase in suicide rates corresponds profoundly with racial grouping.
See this table from the CDC report:
It shows an increase rate in suicides among whites of 40.4% and among American Indians and Alaska Natives at an even more depressing 65.2%. Asian and Pacific Islander (10.6), the “raceless” Hispanic (3.5) and Black (5.8) groupings were much less affected by the trend.
Maybe the result of a greater cultural and economic fall from greater heights for whites? That would not explain all of it. I think the modern rejection of transcendence and embrace of nihilism, requisites of advanced liberalism, have stripped many whites of security outside of materialism and of their natural resilience in the face of devastation.
Laura writes:
Whites are by nature more prone to low self-esteem as compared to blacks. Michael Levin, in his book Why Race Matters, surveys some of the psychological studies that show this to be so. The self is the locus of identity, now more so than ever, for whites in a way that it is not for other racial groups. Blacks have been hit hard by the recession too, but they have not seen a comparable a surge in suicides. I would think the loss of collective esteem is a factor for whites too.
Paul writes:
Some of Mary’s thoughtfulness seems apt and some doesn’t. These words are not apt: “When immediate gratification, coupled with the shattering of important human bonds through divorce and sexual license, bumps up against loss of youth and economic turmoil, the cumulative effect can be nothing but despair.”
Immediate gratification is available in the media and brothels and should be acting as a palliative. Two of my never-divorced cousins committed suicide. Sexual license has been around a long time for men. Loss of youth and economic turmoil have been around forever for everyone. (Honesty requires revealing that one cousin had intractable back pain and was therefore addicted to narcotics; and my sweet, smart, talented, pretty cousin in her mid-forties with two college-scholarship children . . . no one knows. Hanged!)
The shattering of human bonds seems apt. Many of us baby boomers distract ourselves with work, essential to life but not enough for most.
Laura writes:
Sexual license has not been around in the same way for a long time. Many more people are living alone because of the sexual revolution and divorce.
Mary writes:
The point is not that the challenges mentioned can’t be handled with success individually but that when they converge they are unmanageable without a foundation of religious faith.
But economic turmoil is manageable for most only within a wholesome culture that isn’t driven on the engine of materialism, thus allowing the participation of all citizens. As human beings we have a hunger to participate in the culture of our society; the nature of life in modern-day America increases the sting felt by those with financial limitations through materialism and throw-away lifestyles.
And, yes, loss of youth has always been a challenging time but never before 50 years ago has youth been worshipped as it is now. When a culture revels in youth and materialism and builds it’s focus on youthful sexuality, aggressively promoted in TV, movies, music, dance, language, dress, etc., the middle-aged can no longer make a meaningful contribution; they begin to mimic the young in the most pathetic and unsuccessful ways; aging is a disease to be cured with balms and pills and potions. The elderly are completely marginalized. The generations are polarized.
Paul is correct that immediate gratification acts in a palliative way, i.e. “relieving pain or alleviating a problem without dealing with the underlying cause.” Hours of daily, passive entertainment right in the home through TV, movies, etc. do nothing good for the state of the American mind.
