Douthat, noting [NYT] that violent crimes are on the decline while suicides are up, blames increased isolation:
As the University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox pointed out recently, there’s a strong link between suicide and weakened social ties: people — and especially men — become more likely to kill themselves “when they get disconnected from society’s core institutions (e.g., marriage, religion) or when their economic prospects take a dive (e.g., unemployment).” That’s exactly what we’ve seen happen lately among the middle-aged male population, whose suicide rates have climbed the fastest: a retreat from family obligations, from civic and religious participation, and from full-time paying work.
Nate Cohn pushes back:
Contrary to what Douthat might expect, there’s no correlation—zero—between a states’ suicide rate and religion, marriage rates, or single occupancy homes.
State economic growth or unemployment don’t line up, either. … If anything correlates with suicide rates, it’s a states’ population density: In populous areas, suicide rates are low; in the sparsely populated hinterlands, suicide rates are high. Perhaps depression and loneliness is particularly harsh in desolate areas, and maybe it’s easier to cope in a major city like D.C. or New York.
A more intriguing possibility is gun ownership, which, like suicide rates, is highest in the West and lowest in the Northeast. The relationship between gun ownership and suicide isn’t hard to envision, since more than half of suicides are by firearm. Therefore, accessible firearms could plausibly increase suicide rates. Then again, the South has high levels of gun ownership and higher levels of depression than the inland West, but suicide is rarer in Alabama than Montana.
Douthat goes another round:
A strong link between population density and suicide hardly demonstrates that social belonging doesn’t play a role in suicide rates: It just suggests that the literal physical component in loneliness can matter as much or more than emotional and institutional ties. And the geographic pattern Cohn describes is perfectly compatible with other factors — from unemployment to divorce to, yes, gun policy — playing a role in national trends. There are plenty of cases where longstanding patterns don’t suffice to explain emerging trends that cut across regions and demographic groups: The fact that crime rates are generally higher in cities doesn’t mean that “population density” suffices as an explanation of changes in the crime rate, for instance, and the fact that out-of-wedlock birth rates are higher among African-Americans than whites doesn’t mean that “race” suffices as an explanation for the post-1960s rise in unwed childbearing.
One factor that might be salient in increasing suicides is the staggering increase in the use of prescription drugs. Here’s what I recently wrote in my column for the Sunday Times:
Consider that for eleven consecutive years, drug overdose deaths have risen in America, from 4,000 in 1999 to 16,000 by 2010, according to the latest statistics from the Centers for Disease Control. The majority of these deaths are now from drugs prescribed legally in the US and the world – opiate pain-killers like Oxycodone leading the way, but often combined with anti-anxiety medications. Yes, these require a prescription – but just sit down and see how easy it is to get these drugs online through fake doctors or doctors for hire. Yes, more monitoring is now recommended and more crackdowns on unethical doctoring. But you get the distinct sense that this is a losing struggle. Both the technologies of pharmaceuticals and of their distribution have been revolutionized in the last couple of decades. It’s going to be as hard to return to more social control as it will be to sustain newspapers printed on paper.
But that may simply confirm Ross’s worry about social isolation, and the consequences of untrammeled libertarianism. The trouble is that if you accept Ross’s analysis, it’s not clear what the solution is. Freedom is contagious; community fragile.
The Dish 