The not-so-hidden injuries of class

Americans today are taking their lives at rates not seen in three decades. There is an epidemic of suicide under way in the United States and the big question is why.

The news comes from a new government study carried out by the National Center for Health Statistics. The full report is available at //www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db241.htm. The data cover the period from 1999 to 2014.

The New York Times carried an extensive report on the research in its April 22, 2016 edition, which reports on the highlights of the study and cites the hypotheses of several experts who have delved into the causes of the spike in suicide.

Before I discuss those theories, let me set out some of the study’s salient findings:

• Suicide rates in the United States increased 24 percent between 1999 and 2014.
• The increase occurred in nearly every demographic group with two exceptions, black men and people 75 years old and older.
• A sharp increase was seen in suicide rates among groups that historically have had very low rates. This includes middle-aged women ages (45-64) whose rates of suicide increased by 63 percent. At the other range of the age spectrum, suicide among girls 10-14 rose three-fold during the period of the study.
• Groups that have had historically high rates of suicide also experienced an increase, although somewhat smaller than among groups with traditionally low rates. For instance, the increase of suicide in men 45-64 was 43 percent, twenty percent lower than among women of the same age. Still, today the rate of male suicide in that age category is 3.6 times that for women.
• The increase in suicide cannot be explained by population growth since rates are in suicides per 100,000 in the population. However, the raw numbers do convey a sense of the magnitude of the problem. In 1999, in the United States 29,199 people killed themselves. In 2014, that number was 42, 773.

Before I drive you numb with numbers, let’s focus on the explanations offered by the experts consulted by the NYT, followed by my own analysis.

Kathleen Hempstead, senior adviser at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, “has identified a link between rising suicide rates and increased distress about jobs and finances among the middle aged.” Unnamed researchers cited by the Times “who reviewed the study…painted a picture of desperation for many in American society.” And Robert Putnam, professor of public policy at Harvard said: “This is part of the larger emerging pattern of evidence of the links between poverty, hopelessness and health.”

There is empirical evidence for drawing this connection. The Times cites the work of Alex Crosby, an epidemiologist at the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, who has been studying the correlation between the economy and suicide over nearly one hundred years. Crosby notes that the highest recorded rate of suicide was in 1932, the low point in the worst economic collapse in American history. The rate in 1932 was 70 percent higher than it is today. That is not surprising since the Great Depression was much worse and prolonged than the economic crisis of 2008. Moreover, Crosby found “a consistent pattern…when the economy got worse, suicides went up, and when it got better it went down.”

This analysis is good as far as it goes, but there is a missing piece; the way the gains of economic recovery are distributed across the population. The wave of prosperity that followed the Great Depression and World War II was relatively widely shared. The middle class expanded enormously and manual workers were able to have such things as a home and a car, a privilege previously enjoyed only by the middle and upper classes.

The economic gains of more recent decades have not been widely distributed. Indeed, the average income of Americans in real terms today is lower than in 1999. The lion’s share of economic growth has been captured by the wealthy. This was the case before the Great Recession of 2008 and after the start of the weak recovery that followed. It is not surprising therefore that suicide rates have not decreased in the last few years. In fact, the increase accelerated between 2010 and 2014.

Of course, the economy is not the sole determinant of suicide rates. One of the first works of empirical sociology, ‘Suicide’ by the 19^th Century French sociologist Emile Durkheim, found that in countries with strong social solidarity suicide was lower than in places that had a more individualistic culture.

The explanation is straightforward. People who can count on strong social bonds to provide emotional and economic support are less likely than isolated individuals to experience the lowest depths of despair. Such people are also less likely to frame their troubles in terms of individual failure and more in relation to broader social and economic forces, an interpretation that spares a part of their self-esteem.

Nothing in Durkheim’s classic analysis of suicide contradicts contemporary analysts’ focus on the economic factor. Solidarity can cushion the worst effects of economic misery on the body and the psyche. But deprivation still extracts a toll. And solidarity is a rare commodity in American society—the word is virtually absent from the common vocabulary—as groundbreaking books from the 1950s (Riesman, ‘The Lonely Crowd’) to the recent past (Putnam, ‘Bowling Alone’) attest.

Moreover, the dog-eat-dog, neoliberal economy of recent decades has meant that the state has chosen to do nothing—or to do things that make things worse—in the face of the brutal economic shocks and the mind-boggling economic inequality characteristic of American and global capitalism in the present century. The rising tide of self-inflicted death is just so much collateral damage from the economic policy we have been pursuing.

Suicide is hardly the only life or death issue around which the injuries of class become crystal clear. To give just one telling example. The average American man in the top one percent of income can expect to live to 87. A man with an income of $30,000 a year dies on average nine years earlier. Money affects life chances from the cradle to the grave. The irony is that this difference in mortality means that the rich man can collect social security—a program designed to aid people of modest means in their old age—for nine additional years.

Way back in 1972, Richard Sennet and Robet Cobb could write a book titled “The Hidden Injuries of Class.” Today, as the suicide trends show, the injuries of class are hardly hidden. They are open sores, belying all pretensions to an American Dream or to a Great Society.