The Centers for Disease Control recorded 47,173 suicides in 2017, and there were an estimated 1.4 million total attempts. Many of society’s plagues strike heavier at women and minorities, but suicide in America is dominated by white men, who account for 70 percent of all cases. Middle-aged men walk the point. Men in the United States average 22 suicides per 100,000 people, with those ages 45 to 64 representing the fastest-growing group, up from 20.8 per 100,000 in 1999 to 30.1 in 2017. The states with the highest rates are Montana, with 28.9 per 100,000 people; Alaska, at 27 per 100,000; and Wyoming, at 26.9 per 100,000 — all roughly double the national rate. New Mexico, Idaho and Utah round out the top six states. All but Alaska fall in the Mountain time zone.
Last summer, I began a 2,000-mile drive through the American West, a place of endless mythology and one unalterable fact: The region has become a self-immolation center for middle-aged American men. The image of the Western man and his bootstraps ethos is still there, but the cliché has a dark turn — when they can no longer help themselves, they end themselves. I found men who sought help and were placed on a 72-hour hold in a hospital ward, and say they were sent home at the end of their stay without any help, collapsing back into the fetal position — the only thing accomplished was everyone in the small town now knew they were ill. I found men on both sides of the Trump divide: One whose anger toward his abusive parents was exacerbated by hours in his basement watching Fox News and Trump while drinking vodka; the other was a Buddhist mortician whose cries for help were met by scorn in a cowboy county that went 70 percent for Trump.
“I have no one,” a man told me quietly over coffee. Outside, an unforgiving wind whipped through the tall grass. “The winters here are killing me.”
I found something else: guns, lots of them. Guns that could be procured in an hour. A house where a wife did a gun sweep and found dozens hidden. I found suicidal men who balked at installing gun locks on their pistols because they were afraid of being caught unarmed when mythical marauders invaded their homes. And I found that the men who survived suicide attempts had one thing in common: They didn’t use guns. Pills can be vomited, ropes can break, but bullets rarely miss.
For years, a comfortable excuse for the ascending suicide rate in the rural West was tied to the crushing impact of the Great Recession. But it still climbs on a decade later.
“There was hope that ‘OK, as the economy recovers, boy, it’s going to be nice to see that suicide rate go down,’ ” says Dr. Jane Pearson, a suicide expert at the National Institute of Mental Health. “And there’s a lot of us really frustrated that didn’t happen. We’re asking, ‘What is going on?’ ”
The impact of hard times can linger long after the stock market recovers. A sense of community can disintegrate in lean years, a deadly factor when it comes to men separating themselves from their friends and family and stepping alone into the darkness.
“There’s been an increase in the ‘every-man-for-himself mentality,’ ” says Dr. Craig Bryan, who studies military and rural suicide at the University of Utah. “There doesn’t seem to be as strong a sense of ‘We’re all in this together.’ It’s much more ‘Hey, don’t infringe upon me. You’re on your own, and let me do my own thing.’ ”
The climactic scene in Westerns has always been the shootout. Now that’s being acted out in a deadly monologue. Activists in gun-friendly states tiptoe around the issue of eliminating guns, instead advocating locking them up to keep them out of the hands of the desperate and angry. Their efforts are noble, but futile. In Utah, 85 percent of firearm-related deaths are suicides. One of the shocking things Bryan learned was that many of these deaths were suicides of passion — impulsive, irrevocable acts.
“A third of the firearm suicides in Utah happened during an argument,” says Bryan. “Two people were having at it. Not necessarily physically violent, but they were yelling. And someone in the moment, almost always a man, basically just says, ‘I’m done,’ grabs a gun, shoots himself, and he’s dead.”
No segment of the population is more likely to be impacted by these horrifying numbers than middle-aged men in rural America. They not only own guns and lack mental-health resources — by one estimate, there are 80 or so psychiatrists licensed to practice in Wyoming — but they also have chosen a life that values independence above all else.
“It becomes a deterministic thing,” says Pearson. “You are the type of man who has chosen to isolate himself from town, health care and other people. Then you shoot yourself, and you’re hours from a trauma center.”
It’s easy to bash white middled-aged men in America. As a member of that privileged group, I’ll admit that much of the bashing has been warranted: No group in the history of the world has been given and squandered more than the white man. Yet the American white man is responsible for enough suicides annually that Madison Square Garden could not hold all the victims. And no matter how privileged, that’s somebody’s dad, someone’s friend, someone’s brother and someone’s husband. (...)
I spent the next day driving nine hours on two-lane blacktop across the vast, empty part of America from Ketchum to Casper, Toby Lingle’s hometown. In between Sean Hannity braying at me from every AM station, I listened to Marc Maron’s WTF podcasts with Anthony Bourdain and Robin Williams, two of the more notable recent examples of the middle-aged white-male suicide epidemic.
Both men had battled depression, and had struggled with drug and alcohol abuse, a prevalent factor in suicides particularly in the area I was driving through — 30 percent of male suicide victims nationwide have alcohol in their systems, but in states like Wyoming, experts say, it is closer to 40 percent. Otherwise, they couldn’t have been more different.
Bourdain sounded self-deprecatingly ebullient, a gourmand bon vivant who had kicked cocaine and heroin after decades of abuse.
“When you know how low you can go, when you’ve hurt and disappointed people and humiliated yourself for many years, you’re not going to start complaining about the wrong bottled water,” said Bourdain with a small laugh.
He sounded happy and in control, but there were other signs. After Bourdain’s suicide, a fan counted up the times that he uttered lines on his show like “I determine not to hang myself in the shower stall of my lonely hotel room.” That is precisely how Bourdain killed himself in Kaysersberg, France.
Williams offered more-obvious clues. During the Maron interview, Williams talked about an alcohol relapse while filming in Alaska. He sounded exhausted and told a seemingly funny story about the discussion he had with his “conscious brain” about suicide.
“There was only one time, even for a moment, where I thought, ‘Fuck life,’ ” Williams told Maron. He then re-created the inner dialogue:
“You know you have a pretty good life as it is right now. Have you noticed the two houses?”
“Yes.”
“Have you noticed the girlfriend?”
“Yes.”
“Have you noticed that things are pretty good . . . ?”
“Yes.”
“OK, let’s put the suicide over here under ‘discussable’. . . . First of all, you don’t have the balls to do it. I’m not going to say it out loud. I mean, ‘Have you thought about buying a gun?’ ”
“No.”
“What were you going to do, cut your wrist with a Waterpik?”
His conscious brain asked him what he was currently up to.
“You’re sitting naked in a hotel room with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s?”
“Yes.”
“Is this maybe influencing your decision?”
“Possibly.”
Williams then riffed that maybe he would talk about it on a podcast two years down the road. Maron couldn’t help but laugh.
Four years later, suffering from undiagnosed Lewy body dementia, Williams would hang himself in the same Marin County home where the interview took place.
Two of the more famous men of the past 50 years fell into the same existential pit that has gripped so many their age: a curtain slowly falling over a life that outsiders saw as filled with privilege and promise.
Even the famous leave few breadcrumbs.
by Stephen Roderick, Rolling Stone | Read more:
Image: Brian Stauffer for Rolling Stone
Last summer, I began a 2,000-mile drive through the American West, a place of endless mythology and one unalterable fact: The region has become a self-immolation center for middle-aged American men. The image of the Western man and his bootstraps ethos is still there, but the cliché has a dark turn — when they can no longer help themselves, they end themselves. I found men who sought help and were placed on a 72-hour hold in a hospital ward, and say they were sent home at the end of their stay without any help, collapsing back into the fetal position — the only thing accomplished was everyone in the small town now knew they were ill. I found men on both sides of the Trump divide: One whose anger toward his abusive parents was exacerbated by hours in his basement watching Fox News and Trump while drinking vodka; the other was a Buddhist mortician whose cries for help were met by scorn in a cowboy county that went 70 percent for Trump.“I have no one,” a man told me quietly over coffee. Outside, an unforgiving wind whipped through the tall grass. “The winters here are killing me.”
I found something else: guns, lots of them. Guns that could be procured in an hour. A house where a wife did a gun sweep and found dozens hidden. I found suicidal men who balked at installing gun locks on their pistols because they were afraid of being caught unarmed when mythical marauders invaded their homes. And I found that the men who survived suicide attempts had one thing in common: They didn’t use guns. Pills can be vomited, ropes can break, but bullets rarely miss.
For years, a comfortable excuse for the ascending suicide rate in the rural West was tied to the crushing impact of the Great Recession. But it still climbs on a decade later.
“There was hope that ‘OK, as the economy recovers, boy, it’s going to be nice to see that suicide rate go down,’ ” says Dr. Jane Pearson, a suicide expert at the National Institute of Mental Health. “And there’s a lot of us really frustrated that didn’t happen. We’re asking, ‘What is going on?’ ”
The impact of hard times can linger long after the stock market recovers. A sense of community can disintegrate in lean years, a deadly factor when it comes to men separating themselves from their friends and family and stepping alone into the darkness.
“There’s been an increase in the ‘every-man-for-himself mentality,’ ” says Dr. Craig Bryan, who studies military and rural suicide at the University of Utah. “There doesn’t seem to be as strong a sense of ‘We’re all in this together.’ It’s much more ‘Hey, don’t infringe upon me. You’re on your own, and let me do my own thing.’ ”
The climactic scene in Westerns has always been the shootout. Now that’s being acted out in a deadly monologue. Activists in gun-friendly states tiptoe around the issue of eliminating guns, instead advocating locking them up to keep them out of the hands of the desperate and angry. Their efforts are noble, but futile. In Utah, 85 percent of firearm-related deaths are suicides. One of the shocking things Bryan learned was that many of these deaths were suicides of passion — impulsive, irrevocable acts.
“A third of the firearm suicides in Utah happened during an argument,” says Bryan. “Two people were having at it. Not necessarily physically violent, but they were yelling. And someone in the moment, almost always a man, basically just says, ‘I’m done,’ grabs a gun, shoots himself, and he’s dead.”
No segment of the population is more likely to be impacted by these horrifying numbers than middle-aged men in rural America. They not only own guns and lack mental-health resources — by one estimate, there are 80 or so psychiatrists licensed to practice in Wyoming — but they also have chosen a life that values independence above all else.
“It becomes a deterministic thing,” says Pearson. “You are the type of man who has chosen to isolate himself from town, health care and other people. Then you shoot yourself, and you’re hours from a trauma center.”
It’s easy to bash white middled-aged men in America. As a member of that privileged group, I’ll admit that much of the bashing has been warranted: No group in the history of the world has been given and squandered more than the white man. Yet the American white man is responsible for enough suicides annually that Madison Square Garden could not hold all the victims. And no matter how privileged, that’s somebody’s dad, someone’s friend, someone’s brother and someone’s husband. (...)
I spent the next day driving nine hours on two-lane blacktop across the vast, empty part of America from Ketchum to Casper, Toby Lingle’s hometown. In between Sean Hannity braying at me from every AM station, I listened to Marc Maron’s WTF podcasts with Anthony Bourdain and Robin Williams, two of the more notable recent examples of the middle-aged white-male suicide epidemic.
Both men had battled depression, and had struggled with drug and alcohol abuse, a prevalent factor in suicides particularly in the area I was driving through — 30 percent of male suicide victims nationwide have alcohol in their systems, but in states like Wyoming, experts say, it is closer to 40 percent. Otherwise, they couldn’t have been more different.
Bourdain sounded self-deprecatingly ebullient, a gourmand bon vivant who had kicked cocaine and heroin after decades of abuse.
“When you know how low you can go, when you’ve hurt and disappointed people and humiliated yourself for many years, you’re not going to start complaining about the wrong bottled water,” said Bourdain with a small laugh.
He sounded happy and in control, but there were other signs. After Bourdain’s suicide, a fan counted up the times that he uttered lines on his show like “I determine not to hang myself in the shower stall of my lonely hotel room.” That is precisely how Bourdain killed himself in Kaysersberg, France.
Williams offered more-obvious clues. During the Maron interview, Williams talked about an alcohol relapse while filming in Alaska. He sounded exhausted and told a seemingly funny story about the discussion he had with his “conscious brain” about suicide.
“There was only one time, even for a moment, where I thought, ‘Fuck life,’ ” Williams told Maron. He then re-created the inner dialogue:
“You know you have a pretty good life as it is right now. Have you noticed the two houses?”
“Yes.”
“Have you noticed the girlfriend?”
“Yes.”
“Have you noticed that things are pretty good . . . ?”
“Yes.”
“OK, let’s put the suicide over here under ‘discussable’. . . . First of all, you don’t have the balls to do it. I’m not going to say it out loud. I mean, ‘Have you thought about buying a gun?’ ”
“No.”
“What were you going to do, cut your wrist with a Waterpik?”
His conscious brain asked him what he was currently up to.
“You’re sitting naked in a hotel room with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s?”
“Yes.”
“Is this maybe influencing your decision?”
“Possibly.”
Williams then riffed that maybe he would talk about it on a podcast two years down the road. Maron couldn’t help but laugh.
Four years later, suffering from undiagnosed Lewy body dementia, Williams would hang himself in the same Marin County home where the interview took place.
Two of the more famous men of the past 50 years fell into the same existential pit that has gripped so many their age: a curtain slowly falling over a life that outsiders saw as filled with privilege and promise.
Even the famous leave few breadcrumbs.
by Stephen Roderick, Rolling Stone | Read more:
