Great Recession Linked to Rising Suicides Among Middle-Aged Americans

Economic crises kill in more ways than one.

The Great Recession can be tied to a jump in suicides among middle-aged people in the U.S., a new article in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine reveals.

Suicide rates among Americans aged 40 to 64 have been climbing since 1999, far out-pacing other age groups, the researchers note. This included a drastic increase in suicides in 2007, at the outset of the financial nosedive.

The researchers evaluated data from the National Violent Death Reporting System database, which is maintained by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to determine the circumstances and motives for suicides in 16 states.

They found that suicides where external economic factors were present jumped from 32.9 percent in 2005 to 37.5 percent in 2010.

“The sharpest increase in external circumstances appears to be temporally related to the worst years of the Great Recession, consistent with other work showing a link between deteriorating economic conditions and suicide,” wrote authors Katherine Hempstead, director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation at Princeton and Julie Phillips, from the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research at Rutgers.