There have been two suicides of prominent celebrities in the news in the past few days: Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain. I’ll talk about them a bit later in this post, but I want to start with something more general—this news of an across-the-board rise in the suicide rate:
Suicide rates rose in all but one state between 1999 and 2016, with increases seen across age, gender, race and ethnicity, according to a report released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In more than half of all deaths in 27 states, the people had no known mental health condition when they ended their lives.
In North Dakota, the rate jumped more than 57 percent. In the most recent period studied (2014 to 2016), the rate was highest in Montana, at 29.2 per 100,000 residents, compared with the national average of 13.4 per 100,000.
Only Nevada recorded a decline ”” of 1 percent ”” for the overall period, although its rate remained higher than the national average.
Increasingly, suicide is being viewed not only as a mental health problem but a public health one. Nearly 45,000 suicides occurred in the United States in 2016 ”” more than twice the number of homicides ”” making it the 10th-leading cause of death. Among people ages 15 to 34, suicide is the second-leading cause of death.
The most common method used across all groups was firearms.
I don’t quite know what to make of this. An explanation such as the recession, which may in fact be accountable for some small part of the increase, doesn’t really cut it in my book as an overall explanation. I have a gut feeling that it has something to do with a general societal reduction in the sense of community, and a weakening of the prohibition (religious or otherwise) against taking one’s own life, but I simply don’t know and don’t have empirical evidence to back me up.
The increase is highest in white males. That makes perfect sense, considering that they are now fair game for verbal attack as well as being passed over in the job arena more often than in the past in favor of other preferred groups.
An increase in substance abuse involving opioids is certainly part of the picture, as the article acknowledges. And the rates for female suicide are rising too, which is troubling and gives the lie to the idea that women’s lives are more satisfying as their equality—and even dominance, in some cases—in society advances.
Kate Spade’s recent suicide is an example of this. I didn’t follow her fashion career and didn’t know anything about her bags except that there was someone named Kate Spade who made high-end handbags. But the coverage of her death by suicide has highlighted the problem of female suicide. Spade’s death also highlights a fact I think is important in understanding the rise of suicide rates in females, which is that they are increasingly using more lethal methods of suicide instead of the traditional female approach, pills, which is iffier and tends to leave more suicide attempt survivors.
The fact that female suicide has risen does not mean it begins to approach the rate of male suicide, which has long been higher and remains higher. The difference in male and female suicide rates has always been at least partially attributable to the difference in method chosen:
There are different rates of completed suicides and suicidal behavior between males and females. While women more often have suicidal thoughts, men die by suicide more frequently. This is also known as the gender paradox in suicide.
Globally, death by suicide occurred about 1.8 times more often among males than among females in 2008, and 1.7 times in 2015. In the western world, males die by suicide three to four times more often than do females. This greater male frequency is increased in those over the age of 65. Suicide attempts are between two and four times more frequent among females. Researchers have attributed the difference between attempted and completed suicides among the sexes to males using more lethal means to end their lives.
Of course, rates of suicide depend on how much actual suicide is reported as such. The difference among countries, and/or increases or decreases in rates within a country or between genders, might have more to do with reporting issues and reporting changes than actual shifts of rates. As the stigma of suicide declines, are more suicides reported as such when they used to be covered up?
Chef, TV star, and author Anthony Bourdain’s suicide seems even more puzzling than Spade’s. She is reported to have suffered from depression, as did did Bourdain, but there’s no report of recent relationship problems in his life although there were some in hers (separated from husband). He had a history of drug addiction, but that was apparently in the past, although he still drank. How much, and how honest he was about all of that, I haven’t a clue, but he lived a fast-paced life. He’d been divorced about two years ago, but had a beautiful girlfriend.
Both Spade and Bourdain were in late middle age (55 and 61, respectively). That can be rough territory, but both seemed to have enviable lives. Both had daughters (13 and 11) who will almost undoubtedly bear a heavy heavy burden. People say that potential suicides should think about their families, but of course they mostly do, and that can keep them from suicide for a long long time. But suicide by hanging (both of them apparently used that method) is probably often an impulsive act. It requires little planning—just solitude and items everyone has around the house—and therefore lends itself to a sudden and seemingly overwhelming urge. Usually (at least, this is my impression), the person has found life so intensly painful that it feels almost literally unendurable, and that is the impetus for the act. The person may deeply love his or her family and children, but that becomes background to the intensity of the pain and the desperate feeling of need to escape.
RIP. Suicide is a terrible thing, and very terrible for survivors.
I will close with a famous poem that seems especially apropos. It was written in 1897, which shows you that this is not a recent phenomenon:
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
“Good-morning,” and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich ”“ yes, richer than a king ”“
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
[ADDENDUM: I am pretty sure that some commenters on this post will suggest that anti-depressants were involved in or even caused the deaths of Spade or Bourdain or both, as well as being implicated in the more general rise in suicides. That’s a common internet meme, but there’s poor evidence for it, something that has been discussed on this blog before, most notably here (see also this).
It’s also important to note that although the suicide rates have been rising lately they are very similar to historic highs. Here’s a chart for the rates in the US from the 1950s till 2015 (I can’t seem to embed it so you’ll have to follow the link), and you can see that suicide rates in the middle to the end of the 20th century were similarly high, and then there was a dip. The present rise seems to be restoring suicide rates to something similar to the older levels. The recent report uses rates from 2015 and 2016, which corresponds pretty much to the chart I just linked.]
