All the Lonely People. By Ross Douthat. New York Times, May 18, 2013.
On Suicide, Does Density Disprove Durkheim? By Ross Douthat. New York Times, May 21, 2013.
The Trajectory of Suicide. By Ross Douthat. New York Times, May 23, 2013.
The Suicide Epidemic. By Tony Dokoupil. Newsweek. The Daily Beast, May 22, 2013.
The Lethality of Loneliness. By Judith Shulevitz. NJBR, May 14, 2013.
Male Suicide: Where’s the Outcry? By Walter Russell Mead. NJBR, May 14, 2013.
Another Explanation for Male Suicide. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, May 20, 2013.
The Surge in Suicides Has Nothing to Do With Marriage or Religion. By Nate Cohn. The New Republic, May 20, 2013.
The Talent Society. By David Brooks. NJBR, January 22, 2013.
Douthat:
OVER
the last decade, the United States has become a less violent country in every
way save one. As Americans commit fewer and fewer crimes against other people’s
lives and property, they have become more likely to inflict fatal violence on
themselves.
In the
1990s, the suicide rate dipped with the crime rate. But since 2000, it has
risen, and jumped particularly sharply among the middle-aged. The suicide rate
for Americans 35 to 54 increased nearly 30 percent between 1999 and 2010; for
men in their 50s, it rose nearly 50 percent. More Americans now die of suicide
than in car accidents, and gun suicides are almost twice as common as gun
homicides.
This
trend is striking without necessarily being surprising. As the University of
Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox pointed out recently, there’s a strong link
between suicide and weakened social ties: people — and especially men — become
more likely to kill themselves “when they get disconnected from society’s core
institutions (e.g., marriage, religion) or when their economic prospects take a
dive (e.g., unemployment).” That’s exactly what we’ve seen happen lately among
the middle-aged male population, whose suicide rates have climbed the fastest:
a retreat from family obligations, from civic and religious participation, and
from full-time paying work.
The
hard question facing 21st-century America is whether this retreat from
community can reverse itself, or whether an aging society dealing with
structural unemployment and declining birth and marriage rates is simply
destined to leave more people disconnected, anxious and alone.
Right
now, the pessimistic scenario seems more plausible. In an essay for The New
Republic about the consequences of loneliness for public health, Judith Shulevitz reports that one in three Americans over 45 identifies as chronically
lonely, up from just one in five a decade ago. “With baby boomers reaching
retirement age at a rate of 10,000 a day,” she notes, “the number of lonely
Americans will surely spike.”
There
are public and private ways to manage this loneliness epidemic — through social
workers, therapists, even pets. And the Internet, of course, promises endless
forms of virtual community to replace or supplement the real.
But all
of these alternatives seem destined to leave certain basic human yearnings
unaddressed.
For
many people, the strongest forms of community are still the traditional ones —
the kind forged by shared genes, shared memory, shared geography. And neither
Facebook nor a life coach nor a well-meaning bureaucracy is likely to
compensate for these forms’ attenuation and decline.
This
point is illustrated, richly, in one of the best books of the spring, Rod
Dreher’s memoir, “The Little Way of Ruthie Leming,” an account of his sister’s
death from cancer at the age of 42. A journalist and author, Dreher had left
their small Louisiana hometown behind decades before and never imagined coming
back. But watching how the rural community rallied around his sister in her
crisis, and how being rooted in a specific place carried her family through its
drawn-out agony, inspired him to reconsider, and return.
What
makes “The Little Way” such an illuminating book, though, is that it doesn’t
just uncritically celebrate the form of community that its author rediscovered
in his hometown. It also explains why he left in the first place: because being
a bookish kid made him a target for bullying, because his relationship with his
father was oppressive, because he wasn’t as comfortable as his sister in a
world of traditions, obligations, rules. Because community can imprison as well
as sustain, and sometimes it needs to be escaped in order to be appreciated.
In
today’s society, that escape is easier than ever before. And that’s a great
gift to many people: if you don’t have much in common with your relatives and
neighbors, if you’re gay or a genius (or both), if you’re simply restless and
footloose, the world can feel much less
lonely than it would have in the past. Our society is often kinder to
differences and eccentricities than past eras, and our economy rewards
extraordinary talent more richly than ever before.
The
problem is that as it’s grown easier to be remarkable and unusual, it’s
arguably grown harder to be ordinary. To be the kind of person who doesn’t want
to write his own life script, or invent her own idiosyncratic career path. To
enjoy the stability and comfort of inherited obligations and expectations,
rather than constantly having to strike out on your own. To follow a “little
way” rather than a path of great ambition. To be more like Ruthie Leming than
her brother.
Too
often, and probably increasingly, not enough Americans will have what the
Lemings had — a place that knew them intimately, a community to lean on, a
strong network in a time of trial.
And
absent such blessings, it’s all too understandable that some people enduring
suffering and loneliness would end up looking not for help or support, but for
a way to end it all.
