If we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll admit the Great Recession—which economists generally agree hit the United States in December 2007 and ended in June 2009—wreaked havoc on the lives of Americans. Even for those of us fortunate enough to not have lost our homes to foreclosure or our jobs due to layoffs or to the closing of businesses, that period of time was filled with worrying uncertainty and gripping anxiety. If we’re honest, we’ll confess we shared a dread back then, however private we may have kept it: What is going to happen next? How bad will things get? Will my retirement nest egg shrivel to nothing? Will my neighborhood collapse? Will my life collapse? What’s my fate? Unemployment? Bankruptcy? Homelessness? Oh sure, if you were a top earner at, say, General Motors or Ally Financial you had the U.S. Treasury Department on your side and didn’t have to worry. For the rest of us, we had in our heads our own American Horror Story where we and our loved ones were the tormented.
What is wrong with the first sentences of this diary—which is also what is wrong with the general narrative about the Great Recession—is that I wrote them as if the effects of the Great Recession have ended. In one tragic way they haven’t, as I will show. There is also a false assumption in reading the first paragraph—an assumption that is also part of the false narrative about the Great Recession—that our individual and collective misery due to the economy’s recent major downturn began at the precise time the recession itself is said to have begun. It didn’t. It’s acceptable for economists to gather their data, to do their analyses, and to determine firm starting and stopping points of economic recessions. After all, they are the ones responsible for defining them. However, it’s misleading and wrong for them, for the media, for politicians, and for the rest of us to believe that the ill effects of a major economic downturn begin and end with it. They don’t. The fallout from the Great Recession began for some Americans well before the collapse of the stock market in 2008 and even before the end of 2007—the defined birth of the U.S. recession. Moreover, the fallout continues now, years after the recession has ended, long after half of the government’s bail-out money has been repaid and lending institutions have tidied up or are in the process of tidying up loose ends.
Case in point: suicide.
The reasons for suicide are many and complex. In some individual cases the reasons are known and in others they aren’t known. Often there is post-mortem speculation about why someone took their own life. Often that’s the best we can do: guess. If you are one of the 7% of Americans who knows someone who has committed suicide, then you might be familiar with some personal warning signs or some of the risk-factors for suicide. These include psychological reasons (feeling hopeless), interpersonal reasons (loss of a loved one), environmental reasons (living in a home with a gun), social reasons (living alone; being incarcerated), and behavioral reasons (substance intoxication, to wit: 2009 data [pdf] indicates 33.3% of suicide decedents tested positive for alcohol, and 20.8% for opiates, including heroin and prescription pain killers).
Additionally, the economy has also been shown to play a role in suicide in the United States (and elsewhere). Specifically, a significantly constricted economy is a type of environment that plays a role in suicides increasing. A 2011 study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (the CDC) published in the American Journal of Public Health found that suicide reached a record high of 22 per 100,000 Americans in 1932 during the Great Depression (it was half that in 2000). Also, the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the suicide rate in the U.S. was 17.4 per 100,000 people in 1933. By contrast, suicide data I’ve examined from the American Association of Suicidology (which the CDC uses as one of its data sources) indicates that only two states had suicide rates higher than 17.4 in 1999—the year during the dot-com boom when the Nasdaq composite index closed the year over 85% higher than its January 1st opening figure.
When a significant downturn in the American farm economy in the 1980s and 1990s hit—one that led to record numbers of family farms being foreclosed—the number of suicides in America’s Midwest was higher then (in the 1990s) than during the Great Depression. While the so-called “farm crisis” is thought to have been relatively brief—indeed, the word “crisis” conjures up a temporary, not long lasting, phenomenon—suicide was by far the leading cause of agricultural fatalities for two full decades. Male farmers were five times more likely to kill themselves than die by accident. The stress of the Midwest American farmer was so great at that time that Hollywood produced three films in 1984 alone about how the economy can work to destroy farm families (the Academy-award nominated film Country captured the angst perfectly). The wave of farm-collapse suicides was so alarming it spawned a series of Farm Aid concerts to raise money and awareness.
More recently, linking the suicide rate to unemployment using data from the CDC and from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a 2012 study published in The Lancet found that the suicide rate among Americans increased four times faster between 2008 and 2010 than it did in the eight years before the Great Recession began. The Lancet study is consistent with similar recent studies of suicide rates affected by the Great Recession in Greece, Spain, and Italy.
Another study published in the American Journal of Public Health several months ago examined the association between state-level home foreclosures and suicide rates from 2005 (two full years before the Great Recession began) to 2010 (a full 18 months after the recession ended) and it considered variation in the effect of foreclosure on suicide by age. The study found that the foreclosure crisis was significantly associated with increased suicides, independent of other economic factors associated with the recession; and, the study surmised that rising foreclosure rates during the time frame the authors examined might have been partially responsible for the increase in suicides specifically among middle-aged adults. The authors said: "Rising home foreclosure rates explained 18% of the variance in the middle-aged suicide rate between 2005 and 2010."
A 2014 study in the British Journal of Psychiatry that analyzed data from 24 European Union countries, the United States, and Canada found that the Great Recession led to more than 10,000 suicides. Suicides had been declining in Europe, for instance, until 2007. However, by 2009 there was a 6.5% increase, a level that was sustained until 2011. It’s important—critical really—to point out that not all nations studied showed an increase in suicide rates during the worldwide Great Recession. Austria, Sweden and Finland did not have increases in suicides. Why? One of the features of Austria, Sweden and Finland is that they implemented democratic-socialist programs that helped people return to work, such as by providing training, advice, and even subsidized wages.
Linking states’ annual suicide rates using data from the American Association of Suicidology to states’ seasonally-adjusted unemployment rates using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are no statistically significant annual correlations between unemployment and suicide from 1996 through 2011 (see the first graph below). The economy’s influence on suicide isn’t as simple as merely looking at the unemployment rate to predict the nation’s suicide rate.
However, in 41 states (including Washington DC) there was a rise in state suicide rates in 2008 (during the economic nadir of the Great Recession) compared to 2006 (just before the Great Recession began). In these 41 states the suicide rate increases ranged from 0.1 percentage point (North Carolina and Utah) to 6.2 percentage points (Vermont). Yet, suicide rates did not return to pre-Great Recession levels in 2009 or after that, even though economists rang the all’s-well bell. For instance, in 46 states there was a rise in suicide rates in 2011 compared to 2006. In these 46 states the suicide rate increases ranged from 0.1 percentage point (North Carolina) to 5.7 percentage points (Maine). Using 2006 as a pre-Great Recession anchor year, the graph below shows that from 2007—the year before the Great Recession got into full swing—through 2011 (the year most recent data is available) state suicide rates were, overall, higher. Based on the data shown in the next two graphs below, the increased state suicide rates show no signs of retreating to their 2006 levels.
Indeed, the median state suicide rate went from 12.1 per 100,000 people in 2006 to 12.9 in 2008 to just over 14 in 2011. As the third graph shows, the increases in state suicide rates have only accelerated since the Great Recession is said to have ended.
Thus, while suicide rates in general are not associated with unemployment rates, when there is a significant downturn in the economy (i.e., a major recession), then in most places in the United States there is an increase in suicides and these increases persist even after economists have deemed that the economic downturn has ended. It comes as no surprise then that suicide continues to remain on the top ten causes-of-death list in the United States.
The Congressional Budget Office has said that long stretches of unemployment are “correlated with deteriorating mental and physical health.” Unfortunately, states cut more than $1.8 billion in mental health funding between 2009 and 2011, a period of vulnerability for many Americans. For example, in Kansas the suicide rate rose 30% in 2012 from 2011 (505 Kansans commit suicide in 2012; 80% were men). This increase in suicides occurred in the context of mental health funding cuts from the Kansas state government to many communities such as Sedgwick County which had the second highest number of suicides in Kansas in 2012 (a county record of 88) while at the same time suffering from a 53% drop in mental health funding since 2009. Slashing mental health funding, including substance abuse prevention and treatment, appears short-sighted. Again, Kansas serves as an example: The most recent available data from Kansas (2012 data) informs us that suicide is the second leading cause of death for those aged 15 to 24 and those between 25 and 44 years of age (death from unintentional injuries, such as from accidents, is the leading cause of death). Seventy-two percent of persons who committed suicide in Sedgwick County had drugs or alcohol in their blood at the time of death. Might some of these people's lives have been saved if they had had access to substance abuse treatment and/or mental health treatment? Yes, of course.
Of course the Kansans who commit suicide during and after the Great Recession did not benefit from the slashed Kansas budget—which included severely cutting mental health care funding and which also included cutting the taxes of the wealthiest 1% of Kansans by 2.2% while raising the taxes of the poorest 20% of Kansans by 1.3%. Yet, a supply-side economist would ask "But didn't Kansas as a whole benefit from its smaller budget?" After all in 2012 Kansas governor Sam Brownback promised: "Our new pro-growth tax policy will be like a shot of adrenaline into the heart of the Kansas economy." So how did Kansas fare economically since its massive Great Recession tax cuts which disproportionately benefited the wealthy? It’s been devastating. There will be a revenue shortfall of $338 million at the end of fiscal 2014. Fourteen percent of Kansans now live below the poverty level, the highest percentage since at least 2008. In May 2014 Moody’s downgraded Kansas’ credit rating (29 states have higher ratings; 13 have the same rating). Without a doubt, Brownback’s "pro-growth" tax policy has been devastating. Economic policies like Brownback's do not instill hope in people; they do not move them—psychologically or financially—to a better place. Quite the opposite.
When making their talking points about the financial state of the nation, economists never mention that suicides and attempted suicides are economically draining. Yet, suicide and purposeful self-inflicted injuries result in an estimated $41.2 billion in combined medical and work loss costs, according to the CDC [pdf]. This is a low-ball figure because some people who make suicide attempts never seek services (but they still miss work as a result of their attempt). Economists and those who follow their advice also fail to mention suicides rise during significant economic constrictions (which include periods of time before the definition of when a recession occurs) and they fail to mention that suicide rates remain elevated even after signs of economic recovery are evident. Their silence is puzzling since social science researchers have found that people in their "prime working years" of 25 to 64 were the most likely to commit suicide during major economic recessions.
So it's time to change the narrative about the Great Recession, time to make it actually factually complete. You can start the change in your own social circles by telling friends and family members that every time they see a cheery economic headline that reads something like "U.S. economic growth revised upwards again" that many Americans are still suffering from the effects of the Great Recession, and that some may never recover from it. You can change the narrative by telling others—because there will be future recessions—that major economic recessions devastate peoples' lives and that the devastation begins before and continues long after the time span of the recession itself. You can change the narrative of the Great Recession by standing up to people who bash Americans made unemployed by recessions when they say things about the unemployed like Speaker Boehner recently said: "This idea that has been born…that you know, I really don’t have to work. I don’t really want to do this. I think I’d rather just sit around." Call it out for what it is: heartless bullshit that faults the unemployed rather than laying the blame at the feet of those who drove the world into a worldwide recession. If we can change the Great Recession narrative enough, we will succeed in knowing that as a nation we are still suffering, and that we need better social and economic policies to alleviate that suffering. And that is likely to make Americans who are desperate feel a little less alone. Then maybe, just maybe, they will reach out for the help they deserve.
If you don’t know who to turn to:
In the U.S. – Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255) or the National Hopeline Network at 1-800-SUICIDE (1-800-784-2433). These toll-free crisis hotlines offer 24-hour suicide prevention and support. Your call is free and confidential. The National Suicide Prevention Hotline has options for deaf & hard of hearing folks: TTY dial 800-799-4889. Also, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline has options for those involved in the military: call 1-800-273-TALK (8255), then Press 1; or, online chat and text: text 838255. If you are serving in the U.S. military and are in Europe, then you can call 00800 1273 8255 or DSN 118*.
Outside the U.S. – Visit IASP or Suicide.org to find a helpline in the country you are in.
Note about phrase usage:
I strenuously disagree with the argument that the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention asserts, namely, that it is better to use the phrase “died by suicide” than “commit suicide.” They offer no evidence, but for their assertion, that “most people” find the phrase “committed suicide” to be more judgmental and less objective than the phrase “died by suicide.” Suicide is, by definition, both fatal and a choice made by the person. Thus, the phrase “died by suicide” is redundant and renders the act as something passive, rather than an act made by conscious choice. If we are to intervene in helping someone not kill themselves, we must help them see that there are other choices than the act of suicide. Thus, I find the phrase "commit suicide" unoffensive and appropriate. I also strenuously agree with the Foundation that suicide is never a success and thus the phrase “successful suicide” ought to be avoided.