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I don’t know if suicides are more in the news lately or if I’m just noticing them more due to paying closer attention to the various news sources and possible causes. In March I wrote this post asking (rhetorically) “How Many Suicides Will There Be?” after seeing an article at the LA Times on a Costa Mesa, CA city employee who had committed suicide after receiving a lay-off notice.
Today’s (Friday, April 15) NY Times has an article on a study linking suicides to the overall economy. From the article:
The suicide rate increased 3 percent in the 2001 recession and has generally ridden the tide of the economy since the Great Depression, rising in bad times and falling in good ones, according to a comprehensive government analysis released Thursday.Experts said the new study may help clarify a long-clouded relationship between suicide and economic trends.
…snip…
In the study, which appears in The American Journal of Public Health, researchers at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention examined suicide rates per 100,000 Americans for every year from 1928 to 2007.
…snip…
To investigate the effect of business cycles, the researchers calculated the average rate during periods when the economy contracted and compared it with the average during the years leading to downturns. The sharpest increase occurred at the start of the Great Depression, when rates jumped 23 percent — to 22.1 in 1932, from 18.0 in 1928. The study found smaller bumps during the oil crisis of the early 1970s and the double-dip recession of the early 1980s, among other economic troughs.
Peterr has had a couple of posts at Firedoglake in the last two years on this topic as well, here and here. From Peterr’s first post:
When otherwise mentally healthy people get laid off, see their savings spiraling down the tubes, have banks threatening to repossess their homes, or get otherwise personally caught up in our national economic crises, they are miserable while trying to figure out what to do in response and how to come to terms with their new reality. When people with underlying mental health issues (clinical depression, PTSD, substance abuse, etc.) find themselves in these circumstances, however, it becomes exponentially harder for them to cope with the exterior economic stresses.
Hopelessness and despair due to the economic environment.
Peterr’s second post was more in line with this post from Jim White today on the suicide of Clay Hunt of the IAVA (Iraq Afghanistan Veterans of America). From Peterr’s second post:
Desperate times and desperate circumstances lead desperate people to take their own lives. Suicide has many causes, and it seems that each victim has his or her own mix of issues and pressures that led them to kill themselves. Whatever the specifics of each case are, the two aftereffects of suicide are the same in every case: someone is dead, and the lives of their family and friends and neighbors are twisted with grief and often guilt.
From Jim White’s post:
So the Pentagon knows that returning vets face a high suicide risk and yet the Pentagon refuses to include these deaths among the official suicide figures. This means, of course, that the suicide figures actually are even much higher than the Pentagon admits.
As a veteran of the USAF, I managed to avoid serving during a time of “hot war” but I had many friends from my home town, high school, and college who served during Vietnam. I think we are seeing a very similar effect of the “disposable people” with the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. We send men and women to fight in a foreign land and when they return it seems to become more of “Yeah, but what have you done for us lately?”
Whether it is due to economic hopelessness and despair or post traumatic stress disorder hopelessness and despair from serving in war, we are seeing too many suicides from people who seem to feel the world has left them with no other option.
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The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention has lots of helpful information for those who are concerned about this issue, including warning signs of suicide and knowing how to respond to them.
If you or someone you know is contemplating suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255). It’s free, confidential, and they’ve got a national network of 130 crisis centers to help. If that’s too much to remember, just call 911.
Cross posted from Just A Small Town Country Boy
37 Comments
“Experts said the new study may help clarify a long-clouded relationship between suicide and economic trends.”
‘Long-clouded relationship’? Experts are dumbasses.
People are so indoctrinated to believe that they are useless if they are not plugged into the capital production machine. This probably hurts even more than the material deprivations of unemployment.
Send to fight in a foreign land…often young, highly patriotic, and idealistic….maybe poor….and come home to learn the mission may have been a lie, pointless, ignored by the more affluent….such inequity. Such stupid wars will persist at least as long as there is no draft where all truly may be treated somewhat equally.
I thought anyone old enough to recall Viet Nam would be much more wary of an over-zealous Pres. and a gung-ho military.
Suicides are still a largely taboo subject in the U.S. Relatives of suiciders rarely talk about it bc it is a conversation stopper, and listener physically shrinks away.
Suicides themselves are viewed a chickens bc they couldn’t face up to or handle their problems. And that reflects badly on survivors who didn’t try hard enough to help the person in trouble.
Bad scene all around.
Yup. Nothing’s changed since the Bonus March.
Generational amnesia is breathtaking.
Can we substitute- person- for society? I mean ask the same questions on a macro level.
Petro, that is a very cynical take on despair. It allows you to distance yourself from the genuine destruction of existential failure. No one suicides over a theory.
Yep, bad scene all around.
The saddest thing is that it is almost impossible for people to face the fact that there are actually circumstances that occur in this world, in which it is simply too much for a human to continue. There are situations that occur that destroy the soul, plain and simple.
That is so frightening for people to accept that they instead blame the suicider, or themselves, or get angry all around, or run like banshees from the irrefutable fact.
Well, I take your point. I wouldn’t underestimate the significance of indoctrination (nurture) in establishing existential self-definition, however.
Yeah, I learned very young that while I could never consider it an option, I also can not know what pressures someone might have that could make them choose that option.
One of the very few times I ever saw my father cry was after he’d received a letter that one of his friends he had served with during WWII had committed suicide.
Increase in suicides during conservative government
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/2263690.stm
Of course, also linked to the economy but we all know what conservative government does to the economy, be it dressed as a D or R.
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-04-suicide-falls-economy.html
Thanks for putting this out there for us to think about. Along with Veterans being trashed by pols and generals when they return, it is also laid-off public servants such as teachers and those in local government who are treated badly. The bashing of public servants goes on while the screws of local cronyism get tighter and tighter and more and more ridiculous over time.
Ok. The system is an additional dose of poison and may be the thing that topples the person over, like the proverbial straw. But the fatal toxin in the “nurture” is usually not the stupid-ass system itself as much as it is in the person(s) around the suicider who uphold it as the be-all-end-all.
The other matter is that suicides are incredibly rare. 11.1/100,000, or .01%, in the U.S. Even multiplying by a large figure of relatives and friends of the suicider, still means very few people have any personal experience with it.
And the ones who were close are so raw they can’t talk to each other.
Suicide rates (per 100,000) by country. U.S., at 39, is toward the middle.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate
that’s the powers-that-be at work. they’ve been indoctrinating everyone in our country (and most of the world) that we need to go to them for jobs to buy food
it’d be better for the world if people that were laid off and contemplated suicide to go after the source of the problems – all the rich people that control the system
It allows you to distance yourself from the genuine destruction of existential failure. No one suicides over a theory.
Howso? I think Petro’s observation was very pertinent.
I see it on the job all the time–people complain about their work and their jobs all the time, yet when they reach retirement age, they have to be dragged from their jobs kicking and screaming. They have to be dragged from work because not having work–even in retirement, let alone involuntary unemployment, is an admission of uselessness and entails a loss of status. Such people you see often talk about themselves in terms of what they once did, of their past careers, rather than what they are or what they’re doing now or plan to do.
I experienced this reaction myself during a hospitalization I had due to an accident some years back. While I did not get depressed (for I knew I would return) I couldn’t help but notice looking outside at the bright world, and notice how everything in my “former” work life continued on without me. I was no longer needed, or so it seemed.
One of the things that Ayn Rand accolytes promote is her quote –”your work is your purpose in your life”–which infers that the other things in your life is of secondary or tertiary importance. Once, on hunter-gatherers, I argued with a Randie that they had more leisure time and more personal freedom than citizens in modern capitalist democracies, to which he responded something like “but do they DO anything with that leisure time”. The mindset that our personal worth lies chiefly with our value as widget-producing “units” is great for our social betters but a lousy one for us.
-stewartm
stewartm
All those quiet WWII vets, carrying their huge invisible burdens as they walked carefully through their lives! I had an uncle who was not “ok” after he came back, and when he finally died, I felt tremendously relieved for him, but I never knew what or why. All that silence.
Dang, dakine01. You’ve been burning up the front page lately. Congratulations.
Food-for-thought …
I want to share with you about a person I met that who survived what he would call the destructive forces of a totalitarian ideology. I had heard of this man, researched him then had the opportunity to meet and examine him and his story in person. He is old and skinny now with some scars and false teeth. After spending time with him and watching everything he did (his recall is amazing), I did not have any reason to doubt his story. This was all very impressive to me as he is amazingly sane and kind. He even did a little jig to cheer me up when I got sad at a point in our visit when the impact of what he had suffered hit me.
There are more folks like him that are still alive but he is one of the few that makes himself so publicly accessible. He does this for the purpose of bringing hope to the lives of others based upon their examination of the evidence (“blind faith” is an oxymoron in the philosophical system he practices). There wasn’t a thing he needed or wanted from me other than my happiness. For me, my encounter with him was a serious paradigm shifter.
If he is no longer travelling and speaking to groups, you can see a documentary and recent videos about him (spoken in Japanese and Tibetan with subtitles in English).
That suicides are rare is downright sweet. All the stuff that happens to people and yet, generally, they can find some stubborn reason to keep going. Astonishing and lovely.
My husband’s family escaped from Germany after Krystallnacht. Both he & his cousin Walter enlisted in the U.S. army in WWII. Walter married a woman his squad rescued from a concentration camp. So I’ve been close to a bunch of people who survived Nazism, although only one who survived the worst.
Their reactions are all over the lot. Individual emotional fortitude and self-understanding are incredibly variable.
The person you describe must have extraordinary emotional fortitude. Very few people do.
Seems to me we are in a position at the Lake to give support to folks who are really up against it. If and when we can, I think we should.
There are plenty of people in my area that have committed suicide. They have nothing left to give and can’t find work to support themselves and their families. It is a such a sad situation but some of these men feel they have lost all when they can’t feed and house their wives and children.
For the military experience, my father fought in the Korean war and he carried the scars with him all the rest of the years of his life. He would not talk much about it, especially after horrible nightmares, but he did say he did not know who the enemy was.
“but he did say he did not know who the enemy was.”
Wars of empire.
I had met Western and Eastern European survivors of WWII including one from a Siberian concentration camp, survivors of American concentration camps, survivors of American prisons, survivors of horrible things from their biological families and combat vets from over a range of wars. One combat vet freaked out a section of our neighborhood when he snapped in the grocery store parking lot and proceeded to beat another guy with a set of chains.
This man has great self-awareness, self-knowledge and honesty. He had this emotional command of himself but it was not forced. Instead it was very smooth, seamless and without the apparent discontinuities that those with PTSD have which are warnings of triggers one really should be careful to delicately step around. The mental acuity and lucidity was notable including a consistent outward-looking perspective without any me-me-me, I couldn’t detect any pity party dynamics so frequent with Westerns as a result in part of our culture. To have such a light touch in the detailed presentation of his own torture was attention-getting so he is able to deal with content most of the rest of us either go unconscious or freak out over. He appears to go long on attention, focus and determination. I found him a pleasure to be around and figured I’d learn an immense amount by just hanging out, listening and watching as I didn’t have those experiences and am unlikely to. I had other similar experiences with this group of survivors– men and women.
When one retires and soon after, dies, is that because he/she bought into the capitalist propaganda or because every human needs something worthwhile to give? People who retire and segue into something else meaningful tend not to die soon after retirement. It is not capitalism, as such, that causes a loss, when a job goes missing, but the sense of value that worthwhile activity brings.
Yes, I think that a lot of jobs that capitalism has on offer are mind-numbing dehumanizing activities that one might very well decide to suicide over, since they take all the time/energy and bring nothing of meaning. But people do not usually kill themselves for missing out on the capitalist merry-go-round.
I don’t want to take away from the personal aspect of suicide. I know it all too well.I lost count how many people i have known who have. There is a side of this conversation that lurks just under the surface of the conversation here at FDL. Are we as a species committing suicide? How many look to be “raptured”. Are those numbers considered? Is not the get mine now attitude, the rest be damned, a sign of suicidal tendency. I have known people whose bodies gave out, and they said sorry but time for me to leave the party. Others who we know not why they left. We as society have all the signs-debt,things that need to be fixed-remorse, things we cannot replace-guilt,fucking war.
Don’t ask me to write a diary as i am way to depressing.
I am so sorry….the We know not why….is so haunting and lingering….I venture that we almost never know not why…almost a guess or a hunch. With the also terrible question of is there something we could have done? It’s a tragedy for all touched.
From the late Gamble Rogers, folksinger and story-teller extraordinaire, (paraphrasing): An, “ex,” is a has been and a, “spurt,” is a drip under pressure.
Recalling past training sessions for, community crisis line phone “listening,” volunteer work, we were told that April is “the,” big month statistically for suicide. This thread and recent “news,” is not surprising to me. I don’t know if statistics from a bit over 20 years ago are still valid though.
Thank you for bringing up the “Bonus Army.” Let us never forget Anacostia. It was one of the, if not the, greatest betrayals of our military. I posted a comment on a recent Glenn Greenwald article. Not a single person responded. Most commenters believed Kent State was the first action of the US military against the people.
Suicides are currently the 11th leading cause of death in the US. That number is expected to increase in the next 5 years, as the economy will have to deal with fall out from the continuing housing depression/repossessions and a rapidly approaching credit card default crisis. Rates of suicide have been shown to increase as the economy goes down. I’m guessing we will see rates as high as 22% last seen at the time of the Great Depression.
Speaking of, has anyone figured out why the government stubbornly insists on calling this a recession, and continues to claim unemployment is 9% because they won’t count those who have quit searching for jobs, and those who can only get part time work?!? Like calling this what it is, is going to make the depression worse? Or maybe there is a new sensitivity being shown by economists, that using the term depression might cause increased emotional depression?
Back to the topic at hand: In my nursing, I have learned it is important to talk, about the important stuff with your friend, colleague, peer, unemployed neighbor, spouse, relative, barber, dog groomer, whoever…”How’s business?”, “Have you had your time cut back?”, “Are you still able to keep going?”, “Do you have family help?”.
Offer empathy, things like “God, this has been so hard, I’m not sure how you have been able to keep it all together.”, which provides an opening for your friend to talk. Or, “You know, the neighbors and I were talking, and we are starting to share the paper, and magazine subscriptions…want to go in with us?” The idea is to get the conversation about sensitive stuff going, the more your peer talks, gets feelings expressed, the more the burden is shared, the lighter it can begin to feel.
We have to cut through the usual “Did you see that game last night?”, and get to the heart of what is eating our country alive. Maybe you cannot help out with an extra meal, or by inviting the family to dinner…but just conveying that you are interested, and that you care, can help a person enough to keep them from driving into a pole.
Keep tabs on each other. If you do begin to pick up on the fact that someone is “slipping”, starting to talk about how worthless they are…that they are a drag on their family, then you have to ask if they are thinking of ending it. “Are you having ideas about ending your life?” “Have you been thinking about how you would do it?” “Are you planning to kill yourself?”
If the answer to the final question is yes, then your coworker is in trouble and needs medical help immediately. You need to call a family member, to make sure they go to an emergency room, if their family doctor is unavailable. Don’t leave the person alone, make sure they have someone who stays with them until they are in a doctor’s care.
The answers to the first two questions, if positive, can indicate serious depression, and the need for medical attention, but it is not an emergency. The information should be shared with a family member, or someone responsible for your peer, who can see to it that the person is seen by a physician, and medication is begun, to help them cope with the feelings that are destroying them.
In this day and age of computers we are so distant from one another, but as we have seen in Wisconsin, we really need to begin once again, to form communities. I am thinking this emotional bonding, is perhaps a new type of “community” caring, needed today to survive the turmoil of the next 60 or 80 years.
I agree. The tech downturn was a ‘warm-up’ for what’s happening more generally now. I remember that one of my husband’s co-workers blew his brains out in the company parking lot; I understood his rage and despair. Most workers got screwed and tossed out by this company.
I myself was actively suicidal for 7 months, following DH’s depression and inability to find a job for some time. Suicidal in that every waking moment my mind repeated “I want to die”, I could barely eat or sleep, etc. I wasn’t one of those strong, heroic, cheerful types that get written up in the papers. I just kept going for my kids, and fortunately for me, life’s been normal for many years now.
I never forget that security can disappear in a second. And that despair can happen to anyone any time. Me included.
An informative and emotionally beautiful post. Thank you.
Great diary.
I’ve seen people in a psych unit try to “frame” a door, or fold imaginary laundry, because they wanted to DO something. It always struck me how strong the urge is to be of use, to be productive, to contribute. (We found stuff for them to do, by the way, even if we had to unfold laundry first. )
Now I’m seeing a lot of violence in the news locally, most of it directed at women and children.
My new favorite fascination…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SjWC3b-cxE&feature=related
He has written: The Hungry Ghost (about addiction). Scattered (about the emergence of adhd). Hold Onto Your Children (about attachment). His basic philosophy really has to do with how our industrialized, capitalistic bent is destroying the human brain and our human experience. We are looking more and more like the polluted ocean and the whale population. We are being affected but we don’t realize the damage.
I have worked with suicidal folks for some twenty years. The good news is that they can almost always be helped today to learn the skills to build a better life and survive this…and in some ways they are the lucky ones…while the rest of us, just keep walking on the tread mill of life numb to the damage, barely surviving. Those suicidal, mentally ill, the drug addict, are forced to reevaluate and in some ways find something that most folks never get to experience. It’s worth the suffering, worth the pain, to find authenticity and attachment…after all that pain. Some of us do know what helps…we just can’t reach everyone, and the world is not yet ready to face this truth. It’s not just a few of us, but all of us that will suffer.
People who retire and segue into something else meaningful tend not to die soon after retirement. It is not capitalism, as such, that causes a loss, when a job goes missing, but the sense of value that worthwhile activity brings.
Yeah, but what if you’ve been indoctrinated all your life with the message of “your work is your purpose in life”? You do not see a connection between the indoctrination and what happens when “your work” inevitably ends??
I grew up in an era where you see that very plainly. The best thing you could say about someone was that they were a “hard worker”. I used to joke “Yeah, Jack may beat his wife and kids, and cheat on his taxes, but by god he’s a ‘hard worker’”. This is clearly a case of people internalizing a message that was taught to them, beginning in schools and continuing throughout work life. Nor is this of recent vintage, as Edmund Morgan wrote in American Slavery-American Freedom . Elizabethean preachers both extolled the many supposed virtues of “hard work” yet promised the laboring classes a vision of an afterlife where–guess what?–there would be NO WORK. Funny thing, that.
To me, the people who do best are those who see their purpose in life as not their work, but their *play*. To live is to play. Such people often manage to make their work life bearable by turning it into play. But a message of “your purpose in life is to maximize leisure and play”, however well it niches with our hunter-gatherer pedigree (and hunting-gathering is the only mode of existence that ever lasted long enough to influence us biologically) is not something that capitalist overlords want to see spread. No, just like for the Elizabethean gentry that Morgan wrote about, play is just something reserved for *them*; work is for the rest of us.
But people do not usually kill themselves for missing out on the capitalist merry-go-round.
Truth be told, by far the single biggest contributor to suicide, which I don’t see being discussed, is something else. That’s alcohol and drug abuse (primarily alcohol). This is not just epidemiological, there’s a definite neurochemical rationale for this. Monkeying around with one’s brain chemistry is never smart.
-stewartm