What Do the Suicides of Fifty-Year-Old Men Reveal?

Abstract

Over past decade of devastating recession and feeble recovery, there has been a sharp rise in suicides of men aged fifty and over--almost 50 percent, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. From 1999 to 2010, rates of suicide overall have gone up, but steepest rise was for midlife men: those who used to be thought of as prime-age workers at peak of their experience and ability. In that decade, suicide rates for men aged fifty to fifty-four rose from 20.6 per 100,000 to 30.7 per 100,000. Click for larger view As unemployment rises, middle-aged men are increasingly turning to suicide. If we don't elect a government willing to address this crisis, younger people may lose prospect of valuing their own Illustration by Brian Stauffer. Although thousands of individuals ended their lives in such terrible circumstances (6,733 men aged forty-five to forty-nine in 2010 alone), over entire decade American media (including newspapers, magazines, and TV) reported only about thirty instances of startling self-slaughter, plus sensational murder-suicides in which an unemployed person killed a spouse and children. A number of reports did, however, point to high risk of unemployment and its consequences for this age group. A Baltimore man, aged fifty-nine, lost his job at steel mill at Sparrows Point where he'd worked for thirty years when it closed after cycles of downsizing. He took a class to improve his prospects but couldn't get into a retraining program. He felt he was a failure. According to a 2013 article in Baltimore Sun, His wife said, 'The system is failure,' but she couldn't convince him, and he shot himself. A Petaluma man, aged fifty-five, city's chief building official, shot himself week before his employment would have ended. A hedge-fund manager, aged fifty, killed himself soon after his fund lost 43 percent in collapse of stock market. Economic Despair Even taken together, these reports provide little information about deep sources of this public health emergency. Few describe people who were depressed before their economic troubles began. And most depressed people do not commit suicide. scholars believe that rising unemployment and its consequences--not prior mental health conditions--are responsible for a large share of excess deaths. (Excess deaths means those above what would have been expected if suicides had continued to rise at same rate as before 2006.) One blogger, Susie Madrak, writes sarcastically to those who don't get economics of suicide for baby boomers, saying, Yes, losing your job, your house, your life savings, your health insurance and any semblance of economic security might have something to do with it. Click for larger view Many people don't know about midlife discrimination, which means they blame themselves rather than capitalism, Gullette writes. We should fear ageism, not aging. Illustration by Fiona Ostby. Suicide rates are rising in other countries suffering economic downturns, including some countries with higher rates than ours. (Japan's male suicide rate rose rapidly in 1990s and again after 2009, as economic turmoil hastened loss of practice of lifetime jobs.) American rates are higher than those in Western Europe, a culturally comparable region, in part because our safety nets are weaker. According to a multinational team of public health, sociology, and suicide prevention experts writing in respected British journal, The Lancet, for each percentage point rise in U.S. unemployment, there is an almost full 1 percent increase in U.S. suicides. The rate of unemployment between 2007 and 2010 increased 3.8 percent, up to 9.6 percent. Suicide is now fourth leading cause of death among men in their middle years. According to a study published by Kerry L. Knox and Eric D. Caine in American Journal of Public Health, it's responsible for greater premature mortality than other important and well-funded public health problems, like heart disease. But the substantial burden faced by this group has not been translated into a. . . public health priority. Men... Language: en