Suicide in America

In place of my usual Sunday afternoon infrastructure post, I thought I would finally post these thoughts. They have been kicking around in my drafts folder since Meep published her piece on January 30th. I'm not sure I have articulated everything that I wanted to but here it is anyway.

We will start by looking at one suicide, that was in the news, and then look at the trends courtesy of Meep.

On the surface, this woman appeared to have everything. In some way, it wasn't enough. Fatal NYC jumper identified as Miss USA 2019 Cheslie Kryst. Click thru for photos.

Cheslie Kryst was Miss USA in 2019. She was a lawyer. She worked, at least a while as a host on ExtraTV. She appeared to have it all. Apparently it wasn't enough.

The 2019 pageant winner and 30-year-old lawyer jumped from her luxury 60-story Orion building at 350 W. 42nd St. around 7:15 a.m. and was found dead in the street below, sources said.

She posted on F*c*book about World Mental Health Day in 2019.

I do a lot to make sure that I maintain my mental health,” she said. “And the most important thing that I did is talk to a counselor. She’s really easy to talk to. She gives me great strategies especially if I’m sad or happy or have a busy month ahead of me.

She tried to keep some distance between emails/phone and maintain some personal space.

That article is a story of mental health. How can a woman who seems to have a lot to live for not see it? The next article is more about society as a whole, and people not seeing reasons to carry on.

Meep is an actuary. Eminently qualified to analyze mortality trends. Suicide: Trends, 1968-2020, and Provisional Counts Through June 2021.

A whole bunch of folks are going to want to jump on the pandemic as the underlying cause, but the truth is a little more complicated.

While I could generate many potential explanations for the patterns we’ll see below, my main cautions are to note that what may look like a pattern may just be noise, so be aware of that possibility. The other item, which I will not address in this post, is to consider multiple explanations for some of the trends we will see. When I’ve shown some of these graphs to people, many go immediately to their preferred hobbyhorse (such as the rise of Facebook, fall of the USSR, war on terrorism, or whatever their particular political crusade happens to be) and not entertain that there may be alternatives to their preferred narrative.

I will include a copy of one of Meep's graphs - the high level, overall suicide rate for the US from 1968-2020. Without the dataset is hard to say, but an upward trend began around 2000, and the peak of that trend seems to have been in 2016, at which point the rate started to fall. (Data for 2021 is only available from Q1 and Q2, and Meep does cover that. Click thru.)

The rates we will be looking at will be back at the standard units, which is per 100,000 people per year. The crude death rate is simply the number of deaths divided by the population and the age-adjusted death rate is using a standardized age distribution to capture any age-related aspects (which, we will see, aren’t as strong for suicide as it is for natural causes of death.)

Meep also has quarterly data from Q1 2018 thru Q2 2021 to examine the effects of the pandemic.

So is suicide a mental health issue, or a social issue? I think it is actually both at once. Despite Meep's caution above, about seeing things in the data, that might or might not be there, I will look at a couple of things that changed. Changes for which we started to see the impacts of around the year 2000.

There have been a couple of generations who were raised so as to be completely unprepared for the way the world actually works. That is, not everyone gets a trophy in real life. In other words, people were not prepared for the reality of the work-a-day world. This is mostly a problem of suburbia. I don't think poor people ever thought that life was fair. I think some of this is shown by the age-cohort breakdown of the numbers of suicides in the 20 - 30 year old cohorts. (Click thru to see those graphs at the link to Meep above.)

Separately, there is the problem that people don't socialize, and don't know how. That is key to building support, whether creating a traditional, or a non-traditional family. (Watch of group of people at your local coffee house; they are each on their phones.) What the F!#% is this Twitter Ad?? - Chicks On The Right. If this isn't a sign that we've broken a generation, I don't know what is.

The ad promises “a #1 chatbot companion,” which begs the question of when had enough chatbot companions to rate, let alone when we started ranking them, and encourages the viewer to “join millions talking to their own AI friends!”

Why do they need AI friends? Because they have no real friends. They couldn't run around the neighborhood and interact with the other kids. First, that wouldn't have been SAFE, and second, there were probably no other kids in their neighborhood anyway. If they did do anything, it was a carefully arranged and scheduled 'play date' orchestrated by the parents.

Like all generalizations, these wrong, but I think there is also some kernel of truth in them. And there is much more that we have done as a society that has conspired to rob people of hope, but I won't try to find those words today.

The only surprising thing is that there seemed to be a real change in about 2018, though it is too early to say if it is just noise in the plot.