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Money misfortunes may be linked to rising suicide rates among seniors, according to a recent study.
The Great Recession was hard for everyone – and perhaps particularly difficult for middle-aged Americans.
According to a recent study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, suicide rates for adults ages 40 and 64 have climbed about 40 percent since 1999, with a sudden increase in 2007. Researchers found that external economic factors – job loss, bankruptcy, foreclosure and other – were present in 37.5 percent of the age group’s suicides in 2010, up from 33 percent in 2005.
“What we noticed was that this category of circumstances rose over time among the middle-aged compared to other age groups, and seemed to rise the most right at the time period when the recession was at its peak,” says Katherine Hempstead, one of the study’s co-authors and director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Center for State Health Policy at Rutgers University.
Additionally, the study found that suffocation – a method most often used in suicides related to professional, financial or legal factors – also increased among the middle-aged, rising nearly 60 percent between 2005 and 2010.
The study was derived from an analysis of the National Violent Death Reporting System, a database that’s used to examine the individual circumstances surrounding violent fatalities in the U.S. Information was gathered from coroner’s reports, toxicology reports, law enforcement records, supplemental homicide reports and death certificates.
The NVDRS split the suicide circumstances into three main categories: personal, which accounted for depression, substance abuse or other mental health-related factors; interpersonal, which included problems with friends or romantic partners; and external, which factored in struggles with jobs, school, work or money. It also noted various indicators, or clues, that were related to suicide planning.
Hempstead, along with co-author Julie Phillips of the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research, examined these circumstances and indicators for six years.
What's interesting about the data, Hempstead says, is that "it actually gives you information about individual suicides … People who were next of kin were reporting to death investigators that yes, this individual had some kind of reversal, lost their job or had been in foreclosure."
Of course, Hempstead notes, the data set recorded many different circumstances – none of which are mutually exclusive. It’s not necessarily the case, she says, that the only relevant factors were economic or job-related.
And therein lies the complexity of suicide, say, which stems from a hybrid of genetics, life events and environmental stressors. Depression or other psychiatric conditions are often present as well.
“I don't doubt there are external factors that can influence an individual … to commit suicide, but I think it's the case that the vast amount of people who commit suicide have a mental illness,” says Dean MacKinnon, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.