I read the NYT's article about the jump in the suicide rate of people between 50 and 60 (disclaimer, that's my age group) this morning and I expected to read an article about the pressures of our times on a population that's at a crucial juncture in their lives and the real-world fallout of the current economic crisis. Perhaps referencing the availability of firearms, the ease with which we can, in a desperate moment and pushing a button on a device (as we are so conditioned to do), execute a terrible final operation that forecloses all possibilities of a more benign solution to our problems. OK, those are my biases and the data has no obligation to support them and I read articles to learn things, not confirm my biases. I also expected also to see a diary here commenting on the subtle bias I detected in the article but I haven't seen any comments about this.
Backing up, it's clear that the suicide rates in countries where people are increasingly up against the wall, southern Europe for example, are rising sharply, and presumably not because the victims were born between certain years--these unfortunate suicidal individuals are giving up because of what's happening to them now and what they think have to look forward to. Their specific sociological-generational characteristics are interesting background, but not altogether determining factors in the phenomenon I think. We certainly remember hearing about people losing it all and jumping from skyscrapers in Manhattan in 1929. So we have a sense that dramatic economic stresses result in personal despair that leads some to end their lives. In short, suicide rates rise in times of economic distress, they always have, I assume they always will. The reporter might have started with that and drilled down to the specific characteristics of U.S. citizens born in the post-World War II years and into the nineteen sixties that might explain our new suicide rate.
But instead the lede seems to hint at particular characteristics of "boomers," later on identified as their "expectations not panning out" (has any generation's ever?) and a new consumer reality, the availability of Oxycontin. It acknowledges the obvious pressures of a generation trapped between caring for its aging parents and providing for the (now more than ever vitally important and costly) higher education of its children, while weathering (or not) a volatile stock market, financial-medical catastrophes, the deflation of the housing bubble, the difficulty finding employment past a certain age coupled with bleak retirement prospects. I would guess that anyone facing all of these circumstances, might see suicide as a viable option. (I don't want anyone to read this as an endorsement of suicide as a viable option, it's a horrible, extreme one that that we all can and should reject as the product of tunnel vision and the end result of downward spiral of suicidal thinking that can and should be addressed as a life-threatening mental illness--no one benefits and the effects are devastating in this and into succeeding generations of the family.)
The article seems to subtly reference an existing stereotype: the spoiled baby boomer who tragically wanted too much, made lame choices in life and is now seeing its chickens come home to roost. Archie Bunker's imaginable response to the imaginable middle-age travails of his son-in-law "Meathead." The idea is that this idealistic overreaching is to blame for the dark future facing many 50-60 year olds and other age groups in this country today, not global economic forces and political realities.
It's not clear that this is the really thesis of the reporter or Ileana Arias of the CDC because the article goes on to say that the high suicide rate in this age group may essentially be the new normal: future generations may not have it any better and lots of people at this age may choose to opt of life out as a matter of course in the future. (This alone is newsworthy since it contradicts the optimistic notion that this is merely an economic glitch that will pass and we'll all be prosperous and happy again soon.) These considerations undermine the idea that baby boomers are uniquely affected by this phenomenon and suggests that they are rather the harbingers of a new reality of people killing themselves because they couldn't save enough income during their working lives for their old age, a problem we thought we had solved with pensions and Social Security. The article leaves one with the sensation that there are plenty of pressures that have more to do with where we are now as a global society than the particulars of the cohort currently supplying us with 50-60 year olds. The reporter and source fail to mention pessimism related to climate-change predictions that undoubtedly colors some people's sense of the future.
I would ask Tara Parker-Pope and Ileana Arias not to frame the data in personal opinion or give it a newsworthy slant. Their opinions are interesting no doubt at some level, perhaps valid, but a significant uptick in extreme, tragic choices by individuals in a particular age group deserves deeper scrutiny and unbiased analysis--the news media is fickle, this may be the only article on the subject we see in a mainstream news outlet, so framing matters. An equally valid lede might be that the dominant values in our society are literally killing people.