Posted on 10/21/2008 6:10:19 AM PDT by Malone LaVeigh
The rate of suicide in the United States has risen for the first time in a decade and middle-age white men and women are driving the increase, according to a study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Injury Research and Policy.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Without doubt! Probably there will be some Spree killings along with it.
Nah, suicide is childish and is more likely if the messiah isn’t elected.
Well, we were promised change.
What? Baby Boomers buying their first motercycle isn’t enough? Now they have to go out and kill themselves directly?
And if they don’t finish the job, we’ll put a government program in place to do it for them!
Da*n. We get blamed for everything! Not fair!
I think it’s the Boomers hitting the age where they wonder what it was all about. Seriously, I think you’ll find a lot of the irreligious, oft-divorced or never married, aging and no longer able to be sexually active, multiple-abortion and insanely materialistic liberals sinking into profound depression as they get older. But that’s ok, under Obama we’ll have euthanasia all in place and ready to help them over those hard patches...
Overtaxed, overworked, and oversold brain-killing drugs by the pharma cartels.
Cut the baby-boomer insults. Maybe they’re carrying a greater load—kids moving back home, caring for aging parents, retirement plans disappearing, jobs disappearing, losing homes, etc. They have reasons to be depressed.
We are a LARGE group. They are not saying which end of the era they are speaking of, are they?
PS We didn’t ALL do drugs.
It’s a very odd thing psychologically to commit suicide when you aren’t really young, really old. or really sick.
I watched the first 20 minutes of the first episode of a hit TV show (Desperate Housewives) a few years back and was stunned. I haven’t watched it again because I found it so disturbing. The narrator of the show is having just a normal day and then she kills herself on a whim.
A very odd occurance and one that may portent a deep psychosis that dwells within our cultural subconscious. I personally think that we have sold each other such high expectations of what our lives should be, that there are many who reach middle-age, realize they don’t have the time or path to reach those expectations and become despondant.
This spike is troubling and I will want to see more analysis of the data.
I am 57 and it feels like payback.You know what is said about payback.
Start by identifying a more useful age range than "40-64."
It's fiction.
... and one that may portent a deep psychosis that dwells within our cultural subconscious.
Or at least the subconscious of people who write and produce TV smut.
“we didn’t all do drugs.”
At this point I’m more scared of the LEGAL drugs that are supposedly a cure-all for society—paxil, zoloft, ambien, lexi-pro, etc.
Not knocking people who take them and find benefit, but they are given out like candy—and like the other drugs—you can often tell when people are using...
I know it’s fiction, but it is, as you say later, a reflection of the people who wrote and produced it.
Since they are likely in the same age range as those who are actually committing suicide, does that not strike you as more than coincidence?
Sometimes cultural shifts can be seen in the art developed by a culture years before it becomes evident in the lives of the people in the culture. Look at the poetry, art and music of the 50s and see how the 60s turned out.
I was going to say-pencil me in, tentatively, in two weeks... ; )
I see your point, although I don’t know the age of the writers of “Desperate Housewives.”
We also can’t tell much about the actual numbers of suicides. A rate of increase gives us no information about magnitude: from 1 to 2 is a 100% increase.
Just using a common-sense filter, my prediction would be that the majority of the increase is in divorced or widowed individuals between 60-64, perhaps with severe health issues. This is the same group most likely to commit suicide when they’re in their 70’s or 80’s.
As Mr. Hawk pointed out, the increased use of psychotropic drugs is another likely factor.
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