Science News reports this morning on an alarming new trend which suggests that middle-aged whites are a high-risk group for committing suicide.
A dark underside of middle-age has surfaced in the past decade. Although this phase of life is one psychologists have long considered a time of general stability and emotional well-being, white men and women ages 40 to 64 accounted for the bulk of a recent increase in the U.S. suicide rate, a new study finds.
Data gleaned from U.S. death certificates show that the overall suicide rate rose 0.7 percent annually between 1999 and 2005, reversing a downward trend in the rate that had begun in 1986. This increase primarily reflected a 2.7 percent annual rise in the suicide rate among middle-aged white men and a corresponding 3.9 percent annual rise among middle-aged white women, say epidemiologist Susan Baker of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore and her colleagues.
A sociologist weighs in…
In 2005, evidence of a disproportionate number of annual deaths among middle-aged people in the United States raised suspicion that an escalating percentage of the deaths were suicides, remarks sociologist Robert Bossarte of the University of Rochester Medical Center in Rochester, N.Y. “The big unanswered question is why middle-aged adults killed themselves at an increased rate in the years covered by this new study,” Bossarte says.
Possible contributors to this trend include mounting numbers of military veterans reaching middle age and rising difficulties for middle-aged individuals in trying to secure medical insurance, he suggests.
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