EACH year the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a federal agency, adds up the causes of death noted on coroners’ certificates. It is the most melancholy of lists, from heart disease at the top to scarlet fever at the bottom. Suicide usually hovers around number ten, prominent but not exactly startling. On April 22nd the CDC sorted the numbers another way, picking out the suicides and examining trends in self-destruction. Viewed this way, the data are alarming: America is in the grip of a sustained raise in the suicide rate across all age groups and for both sexes. From 1999 to 2014, the suicide rate rose by 24%. The numbers are adjusted to take account of ageing. Men shoot themselves; women take poison. There has been a rise in suffocation and strangulation.
The finding fits with other melancholy ones from economists, including Anne Case and Angus Deaton, who have pointed to declining life-expectancy for poor whites, and Raj Chetty of Stanford and his colleagues at Harvard and elsewhere, who show how inequality correlates with illness. Everything seems to point in the same direction, to a national malaise, challenging the...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/1UjjDjV
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