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 financial mishaps — 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, mental health experts 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.
The study did confirm that personal factors, including a history of mental health issues, were present in 81 percent of the examined suicides, although MacKinnon says he was surprised the study didn’t find a high degree of association between depression and suicide rate.
However, past research has indeed found that suicide rates tend to rise with a state’s unemployment rate. Christopher Ruhm, a professor of public policy economics at the University of Virginia, has studied the effect of economic recessions and depressions on health. His research suggests that for every single percentage point increase in a state’s unemployment rate, the number of suicides increases about 1.3 percent.
“I think the increase [the study found in suicide rates] in 2007 could be partly related to the crash of the economy,” Ruhm says — although he did note that the recession doesn’t account for other longstanding trends that might have contributed to the overall 40 percent increase in suicide rates among the middle-aged.
Midlife is also a time period filled with stress and a particular vulnerability to financial difficulties, says Margie Lachman, a professor of psychology at Brandeis University and director of the Lifespan Initiative on Healthy Aging.
“[The middle-aged] are supposedly at the peak of their earning years, they’re typically supporting themselves as well as family members and they have a lot of responsibilities,” Lachman says. “So maybe the Great Recession would have a more dramatic impact on people in midlife than other people at different periods of time in the life course.” Studies also suggest that the middle-aged have both a higher rate of clinical depression and a lower reported level of life satisfaction — both of which might be exacerbated by financial difficulties.
According to Hempstead, the study’s findings carry implications for suicide prevention and awareness.
“Finance issues, like loss of your job [and] loss of your home, are really major stressors for middle aged adults,” she says. “People who are interacting with adults that may be going through these reversals — whether it’s someone in a human resources department or a primary care physician — should be aware that these circumstances [have actually] been shown to be a contributing factor to suicide.”
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Financial Worries Linked to Rising Suicide Rate Among Baby Boomers originally appeared on usnews.com
