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Raw Data: Suicide over the past century

This is apropos of nothing in particular. It just happened to come up in conversation the other day:

The US suicide rate has been increasing since 2000, and it's a worrisome trend. On the other hand, suicide is still less common than it was during the entire first half of the 20th century.

So is suicide "higher than normal"? It depends on whether normal is the first or second half of the 20th century, and that's impossible to say. On the other hand, we can say that the US trend is quite different from that of our peer countries:

In 1990 the US suicide rate was middle of the pack. Today it's at the top and still rising. Why?

51 thoughts on “Raw Data: Suicide over the past century

  1. iamr4man

    The game of life is hard to play
    I'm gonna lose it anyway
    The losing card I'll someday lay
    So this is all I have to say
    Suicide is painless
    It brings on many changes
    And I can take or leave it if I please

    1. dilbert dogbert

      Words to the new popular song!!!!
      Well, they’ll vaccinate ya when you’re trying to be so good.
      They’ll vaccinate ya just a-like they said they would.
      They’ll vaccinate ya when you’re tryin’ to go home.
      Then they’ll vaccinate ya when you’re there all alone.
      But I would not feel so all alone.
      Everybody must get vaccinated.

  2. bbleh

    I'd suggest some scatter diagrams comparing various industrialized countries' suicide rates in various years vs. various measures of social welfare, especially ones pertinent to lower socioeconomic groups, e.g., bottom-quintile income growth, bottom-quintile wealth share, GINI coefficient, poverty rate, national+state social budgets as fraction of GNP ...

    1. kaleberg

      It would be interesting to overlay that diagram with the familiar transparent recession bars. I can easily see the Roaring 20s give way to the Depression. Weren't there lots of suicides related to the financial collapse of real estate and then the stock market? There's also the post-World War II decline as the economy grew heartily and a weaker decline during the Clinton years.

      Of course, I could just be seeing generational cohorts with the post-Civil War boomers, the post-Great War boomers and the post-World War II boomers reaching certain ages.

      1. HokieAnnie

        And the stats are painfully apparent - having guns in a household exponentially increases the risk of a suicide occurring in the house.

        1. kaleberg

          Yes, but the car was becoming an important thing. I remember one study in the 1920s asking school kids what the most useless animal was. They chose the horse. The authors noted that ten or twenty years earlier, every kid in the country wanted a horse.

          I think a number of things were going on. The nation was rapidly urbanizing. It hit 50% by the 1920 census. Women, especially, are happier in cities than stuck out in farms. There's all sorts of stuff to do in the city, theater, restaurants, dance halls, chop suey joints, good looking guys and no grueling farm work.

          Queen Victoria was dead, and people were getting laid more often. By 1920, only 50% of all first time brides were virgins. Latex condoms were available, and a lot of very 1920s brand names still survive - Sheik, Ramses, Trojans. Sex and urbanization go hand in hand. There's a reason young people are still moving out of small towns and into big cities, even with COVID around.

          There were also a lot of immigrants who arrived late in the 19th century. By 1910, they were settled in their new country and were probably pretty happy about getting the hell out of their home countries. If you weren't happy, you could commit suicide or you could go back to your home country which was sometimes the same thing.

  3. frankwilhoit

    Why? Read your own chart: it is because suicide rates in France and Germany have fallen through the floor, while nearly no-one else's, including ours, have changed significantly. So the real question is, why the change in France and Germany? (And the idle question is, what happened in Belgium...?)

  4. Displaced Canuck

    One reason that I have seen explained in the past is that the US has many more guns in the general population and guns are a more common method of suicide in the US. Unfortunately guns are a much more effective method so the rate of suicide attampts is similar but the death rate is higher. The fact that private gun ownership is rising rapidly in the US and dropping in many other counties could explain the changes Kevin documented.

    1. Jasper_in_Boston

      Bingo. I came here to post the question as to "why" the decrease in suicides in the post-war period. And I'm sure guns are probably a big factor (also, increasing urbanization probably meant an expansion in the portion of the population that was near a top tier trauma center, along with improvements in trauma medicine).

  5. Christopher Kenneth Derrick

    I’m going to speculate that the rate is about the same but coroners and medical examiners are more professional and less likely to rule things an “accidental death” while “cleaning their gun”.

  6. rick_jones

    we can say that the US trend is quite different from that of our peer countries

    While it may not change much, how are you picking peer countries? For example but not limited to, Why Sweden but not also Norway? Italy but not Spain or Greece. Why not Canada? Etc etc.

  7. jharp

    Loyal follower (Washington monthly) but have backed way off on commenting since the new site.

    Anyways. 60 plus year Midwesterner who has lost several classmates to suicide. All men.

    And the children of my peers who died of drug overdoses is the one that really shocks me. I’d guess at least a dozen.

    Times are a changin. O for the first 40 years of my life to this.

  8. Joseph Harbin

    The map here tells a part of the story. The suicide rate does not appear to be improving anywhere in the US, but the regional disparities are striking. The West (wow) and a few other spots like Appalachia are suffering the worst of it.

    Lots of the places seeing many suicides are the same places with low vax / high death rates during the Covid pandemic. We hear many reasons why people are not getting vaxed -- ideology, disinformation, and so on -- but one reason that may explain some of it is despair. A lot of people in the exurbs and in rural America have been left behind and don't have the same will to live we take for granted.

    It's an epic crisis that deserves a place on the next State of America edition.

  9. cld

    The social conservative message is,

    your life can't be good while someone else has a different life.

    The more different someone else's life is, the more alienated they want you to feel from it. It was easy when there were just a few weird characters, blacks, Jews, gays, they were easy to isolate, easy to dismiss, easy to be not that much worked up about, but worked up just enough to keep the gullible voting for tax breaks for billionaires.

    But now modern media brings the infinity of the world right into your lap and inevitably diversity will sink in, and to stay alive wingnuttism must double down, double down and double down again, every time, until every thing you see on tv gives you a mental problem and you get up and walk outside in the middle of nowhere somewhere and there's nothing there.

    So at the next opportunity you vote for revenge.

    1. golack

      And of course, there's the "Prosperity Gospel" If you believe hard enough, God will reward you on Earth! If someone has a problem--you don't have to care=--it's in God's hand. You just have to give more money to the preacher. But now, if you have a setback, it's because God has found you wanting.

  10. iamr4man

    How does assisted suicide figure into this? Is it considered “suicide” in the same way as a person killing themselves due to a romantic breakup?

    1. jte21

      I think there's only about 10 states that have assisted suicide laws on the books (with varying levels of actual assistance/intervention in the process allowed by doctors) and a relatively small number of people take advantage of them each year. I'm sure it's a minuscule number compared to the number of "regular" suicides, if you can call them that.

  11. jte21

    Guns.

    You can kill yourself a lot of ways, but your chances of succeeding are way higher if there's an easily accessible firearm around. My family has known at least three friends/acquaintances in the past decade or so who have ended their own lives because there was an unsecured firearm around the house. Of course depression/mental illness was involved in all of them, but there's a good chance they would still be alive today if they hadn't been able to easily find a handgun when things started getting bad. You can drive 20 miles to throw yourself off a bridge or something, but that takes planning and screwing up the courage to do it, etc. If there's a loaded gun in the nightstand next to your bed or a shotgun in the closet, that cascade of terrible decisions happens a lot faster.

    That's something far more likely to happen in the US than virtually any other advanced country. But apparently suicides aren't fetuses, so nobody gives a shit.

    1. cld

      It starts going up with Prohibition and the rise inequality and the agricultural depression and the dust bowl, and it starts going down again with the growth of labor unions, the repeal of Prohibition and the New Deal.

  12. Ldm

    I am always a bit suspicious of historical suicide records. There are many reasons suicides were not reported as such - some religions, for example, forbid the burial of suicides in consecrated ground. The difference in the number of reported suicides might be at least partly due to our more open-minded attitudes about it.

  13. MindGame

    The short answer: Guns.

    The long answer: In addition to the wide availability of guns, which certainly contrasts the US to most of our peer countries, I suspect the universal healthcare available in European countries -- combined with a general decline in the onus of seeking psychiatric help -- has been a major factor in lowering suicide rates in most of our peer countries. From what I can tell, most other countries have also been far better able to contain sprawl, with the consequence that they have mostly avoided the extreme isolation and social fragmentation that often results from uncontrolled development.

  14. Spadesofgrey

    Guns are irrelevant. It's drugs, consumerism and automation. Notice the rise in the 60's, which corresponds to the big automation push. A economy that doesn't value production, but debt based consumption.

  15. Salamander

    Uh, lots and lots of finger pointed at "guns." This one is easy to fine out: break out the various means of suicide through the ages, then look at those graphs. No need to speculate.

    (And no, I don't know the answer. Sorry.)

    1. JonF311

      I know of three successful suicides. One used a gun. One jumped. One hanged himself. And one unsuccessful attempt-- someone who cut their wrists.

  16. cephalopod

    I have to agree that it is likely heavily influenced by guns.

    We have had massive increases in handgun ownership, and handguns are shockingly good at killing people immediately. Suicides among Black people are rising in recent years, and it's likely there is a connection to increased gun ownership.

    You usually see suicides drop during national crises, like wars, pandemics, and natural disasters, only to rise when the immediate disaster fades. If that plays out with covid, we could be in for years of rising suicide rates.

    One thing that complicates US measures: fentanyl. It is so good at killing people, and it is often hard to differentiate between an accidental and a purposeful overdose.

  17. roboto

    Japan and South Korea both changed the criteria for reporting a suicide and in Japan, the number of suicides jumped 35% in 18 months in 1998/99, something that never had happened in a developed country, apart from South Korea for the same reason.

    Before around 1998, a person in the countryside could call in a death of a parent, often a heart attack, and a doctor didn't have to verify it by visiting the home. That changed and so when doctors were required to confirm deaths the suicide rate shot up.

  18. aqualordy

    Not relevant to the present but suicides went up in the 20s and then dropped after the Great Depression?!? This is pretty fascinating.

  19. Special Newb

    I think adults have a right to suicide. I think in some situation it is the best answer. Sometimes your life is shit and it won't be getting better. Sometimes you really are too great a burden on those around you.

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