Heath Ledger’s passing seemed to re-ignite a wide interest in the causes, treatment, and perception of suicide. Emerging research in the U.S. suggests the interest is long overdue and tremendously misunderstood.
Ledger, it has been revealed, accidentally overdosed. Nonetheless, he sparked a discussion and highlighted the media and society’s obsession with youth suicide.
However, new data reveals that while suicide is increasing in all age groups except those above 65 years of age, the increase is most surprisingly marked among the middle-aged. More interesting, is that there is no clear or consistent explanation — and the nature of suicide makes it tremendously difficult to understand, predict, prevent, and catalogue.
Patricia Cohen of the New York Times writes:
A new five-year analysis of the nation’s death rates recently released by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the suicide rate among 45-to-54-year-olds increased nearly 20 percent from 1999 to 2004, the latest year studied, far outpacing changes in nearly every other age group… For women 45 to 54, the rate leapt 31 percent… By contrast, the suicide rate for 15-to-19-year-olds increased less than 2 percent during that five-year period — and decreased among people 65 and older.
The question is why. What happened in 1999 that caused the suicide rate to suddenly rise primarily for those in midlife? For health experts, it is like discovering the wreckage of a plane crash without finding the black box that recorded flight data just before the aircraft went down.
The Times piece suggests the primary suspect is prescription drugs. That is in a sense misleading as prescription drug use is rather a symptom of an underlying problem. Why are prescription drugs being taken in the first place? And why the sudden shift at the turn of the century?
Societal Collapse
I just finished going through a series of interviews with Noam Chomsky from mid-2007. He remarked that he was frequently asked — often quite angrily — why he doesn’t do more for the 9-11 Truth movement.
His response stuck with me. He is not a supporter or a follower of the movement, but recognizes the appeal. People turn to the 9-11 Truth movement as a rare opportunity to become involved with others, give one’s life purpose, develop a sense of accomplishment, and articulate and challenge a sense of helplessness. There are fewer and fewer places people can do this anymore, he notes.
Robert Putnam is often cited when discussing the societal collapse that’s occurred in the last few decades. His Bowling Alone is the starter text for conversations about the death of public space and social activity in the late 20th-century.
Chomsky built on Putnam’s offering by emphasizing the modern person’s exclusion from nearly all consequential dialogue and action, their disenfranchisement over their economic well-being, and the loss of value and information in public discourse and media.
The Times article pulled out, too, the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars — but especially the Vietnam War — as potential causes of the suicide spikes. Their participation produced a sense of blame and regret disembodied from any active agency in a decision-making or reflective process after the fact and alienated them from their actions. In fact, the Vietnam period — and the early 21st-century can be marked as a time when individuals where explicitly excluded from agency and purposefully misled.
Isolation and Atomization
The often purposeful atomization and isolation of individuals is not limited to the political process, of course.
Economically, the helplessness of the average citizen under the hand of managed mutual funds, MCI-WorldCom-type scandals, and the blatant deception and collusion of corporatists, wears at a struggling and decaying middle-class.
“Financial innovation” like our sub-prime mortgages or massive support for hyper-profitable and exploitive companies devastates opportunity and defies the stated objectives of our governments.
Suburbanism and the government-funded destruction of the public realm was purposeful, corporatist led, and highly marketed. The expansion of the work day and neglect of vacation time, combined with always-on connectivity devices, has affected social networks and families, resulting in empty homes on empty streets in empty neighbourhoods.
Oh, and fuel and food and water is about to get a lot more expensive.
And if you think any of this is unfair, don’t bother voting. Electoral law and the privatization of voting disenfranchises folks to begin with; campaign finance is a joke no matter where you look; and once elected, “leaders” often end up doing the exact opposite of what the citizenry wants or indicate anyway (US: Universal health care; Canada: Climate change action; Alberta: Oil and gas royalty restructuring).
Psychological Autopsies
In the Times piece, it is pointed out that we won’t really be able to easily understand the causes of this alarming spike in suicides. Psychological autopsies are casually offered. Our deep dishonesty about the causes of our collective and individual suffering, and the reliance of the corporate marketplace on our sense of inadequacy and dis-ease make it difficult to gain much from such suggestions.
A study that suggests Ambien-usage might be the cause of suicide but doesn’t ask why the person is taking Ambien firstly is of nearly no value. (For example, knowing that Heath Ledger OD’d on Ambien might be less relevant than understanding why he took them at all).
While more research is needed to help understand these deaths, there are questions that society much ask, too, and responses to be taken. Are people empowered, do they control their lives, do they feel pride and fellowship, do they feel informed and is the world understandable, are they a force for positive change or guilty through passivity, do they feel loved and care for? If not, how can we get to where we want to be?
We must care for one another. And we must struggle to make every human life worth finishing.
Midlife Suicide Rises, Puzzling Researchers [NYT]
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Writing this made me think of Patrick Watson’s “The Great Escape:”
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