USA. record number of suicides, especially among males

America's mental health crisis drove suicides to record numbers last year, according to an article reported by the Wall Street Journal.
Nearly 50,000 people will die by suicide in 2022, according to a provisional count from the National Center for Health Statistics. The agency said the final count would likely be higher. The suicide rate of 14.3 deaths per 100,000 people reached the highest level since 1941, the year the world was at war and the US entered it. This is one suicide death every 10 thousand people.

The record reflects the great struggles to help people with mental distress in the wake of a pandemic, which has upended the economy, society and left many isolated and scared. Shortages of health workers, the supply of increasingly toxic illicit drugs and the ubiquity of firearms have facilitated the rise in suicides, mental health experts have said. Here is a graph that shows the number of suicide deaths also divided by sex, from which we understand how men are much more likely to commit suicide.

“There has been a breakdown in our economic health and our social fabric. We are still experiencing the consequences,” said Jeffrey Leichter, a psychologist who links mental health and primary care at Sanford Health, an operator of hospitals and clinics in the Dakotas, Minnesota and Iowa.

Men aged 75 and older had the highest suicide rate last year, nearly 44 per 100,000 people, double that of people aged 15 to 24. Firearm-related suicides become more common with age as people experience worsening health, loss of loved ones, and social isolation. While women have consistently been found to have suicidal thoughts more commonly, men are four times more likely to commit suicide.

Let's look at suicides by age group

But there is evidence that efforts to reach people in crisis are helping. Suicide rates for children aged 10 to 14 and for people aged 15 to 24 fell by 18% and 9%, respectively, last year as of 2021, reporting rates of suicide in these groups at prepandemic levels. The disaster, however, is in the other generational classes: the increase is dramatic among those in their forties, fifties and over 75s. Generations who, evidently, feel displaced.

Even from an ethnic point of view, there are groups that are suffering much more from the current socio-economic situation:

Native Americans remain the group with the highest number of suicides, although decreasing, while these are growing among whites and African Americans.

Mental health care is harder to find than before the pandemic. About half of people in the United States live in an area without a mental health professional, federal data shows, and about 8,500 more would be needed to fill the gap. Most people rely on family doctors for mental health care, said Leichter of Sanford Health.

It seems obvious that people feel worse and commit suicide because of it. This is a socio-economic data worth more than 100 statistics and shows a welfare crisis that no one talks about.

Meanwhile, the number of overdoses in the US is skyrocketing, another form of suicide, albeit less obvious

Obviously all these problems take a backseat: in the end life and its quality, its motivations, remain elements of little importance for the state.

---

---

The USA article. record of suicides, especially among males comes from Economic Scenarios .

---

This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/usa-record-di-suicidi-soprattutto-fra-i-maschi/ on Wed, 29 Nov 2023 10:00:13 +0000.