Global suicide capital of the world, another US world record
Suicide rates in the US are among the highest in the world, having increased by 33% since 1999, and has become the 10th leading cause of death in “the land of the brave and the free”. The number of black youth taking their lives has been most disturbing.
In 2019, over 12 million Americans seriously thought about taking their own lives, 3.5 million of them planned a suicide, with 1.4 million actually attempting suicide.
While the suicide rate itself has declined among white and Native American teenagers, it has risen by almost 50% among black boys and men between 15 to 24 years of age.
Why is it that so many Americans just seem to be unable to take the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and contemplate ending it once and for all?
Death by despair
Why are so many Americans taking their own lives and see suicide as their only way out? Why are African American youth increasingly attempting suicide? Why do so many US veterans take their own lives as well? And what is the US Government doing to try to solve the severe public health problem?
According to an international report by the Commonwealth Fund on Health Care, the US has the highest suicide rate of any wealthy nation. Suicides account for 14 deaths per 100,000 people in the US, which is double the suicide rate of the United Kingdom. Consequently the US outspends all wealthy countries on health care by a large margin.
What are some of the reasons for someone to commit suicide?
Lot of reasons, obviously, some of them are pretty traditional; alcoholism, loneliness, depression, things like that. I've always been with this but as I mentioned in times of increasing income inequality, more and more people are suffering from things like homelessness, a sense of alienation from other people.
More alcoholism, more drug abuse, and people who are mentally ill, their symptoms get worse. So really, all of the risk factors for suicide are worse in times like this.
And people are feeling more alienated because, in the United States, there's a huge division between people who feel that everyone needs to take care of themselves in circumstances where that's increasingly impossible for a lot of people.
Rick Staggenborg, Retired Psychiatrist, Department of Veterans Affairs
Now in the 12 month period ending in April 2021, in the midst of the COVID pandemic, more than 100,000 Americans died from an overdose. This was more than the number of people dying from gun violence and car crashes combined.
The overdose rate saw a 30% increase from the previous year. Some experts consider drug overdoses, a form of suicide.
I think the further we're detached from nature, and the more we become obsessed with computer technologies and iPhones and virtual this and virtual that, it becomes a situation where we start to lose our humanity and that leads to the potential for new types of mental anomalies that could contribute to suicidal thoughts and actions.
And we also have an opiate problem since the advent of the Afghanistan war. And so, especially in rural areas, there's been an increase of suicide over opiate addiction.
Walt Peretto, Political Analyst
Experts believe that this massive increase in drug overdose is partly due to the opioid epidemic which started in the 1990s when pharmaceutical companies lobbied and made prescription pills like OxyContin, the main pain treatment.
Later when the government tightened its scrutiny on drug companies, and the doctors supplying the pills, the black market made alternatives like heroin, and more recently, Fentanyl, cheaper and more readily available.
Why have so many young Americans thought about ending their lives during the COVID-19 pandemic?
If I were a young person, I would be struggling with feelings of hopelessness, between climate change, endless war, the divisions in our society, the fact that they want to go to college and improve their chances for the future, though they're likely to end up in debt bondage for the rest of their lives.
The fact that the government doesn't seem to care, and half of America supports a party that really is pretty upfront about serving the interests of corporations; the other party at least says they don't, but of course they do.
So they see that politics doesn't work, government doesn't work for the people, the banks and other wealthy interests are more and more in control and they certainly don't care about average people.
And the economy is suffering, the real economy, the economy that affects the middle class. Their prospects, economically, are much, much dimmer than they were when I was a kid.
I mean, it's enough to make you weak when you stop and really think about how we are abusing our kids and robbing them of their future.
Rick Staggenborg, Retired Psychiatrist, Department of Veterans Affairs
The National Institutes of Health in the United States reported that 4.8% of American adults aged 18 and older had seriously considered suicide in 2019.
And among all age groups, these suicidal thoughts were more prevalent among young adults aged 18 to 25.
What is the reason for the annual increase of suicides in the United States?
Probably a number of factors, I think a lot of it has to (do with) instability in society. But one of the biggest factors in that is the increasing income inequality. That's been shown to cause a lot of problems in the social fabric. More drinking, more alcoholism, more suicides, more other bad things.
Rick Staggenborg, Retired Psychiatrist, Department of Veterans Affairs
One of the groups in the US which disproportionately commits suicide is US veterans.
The suicide rate among veterans is 52.3% greater than non veteran US adults. Statistics show that four times as many troops and veterans have died of suicide than have been killed in combat.
The numbers have surged since 2005, with the military actively engaged on the ground in two wars.
My own belief is that, I worked for the VA so I'm pretty familiar with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and the different kinds of things that can cause it.
So looking at the nature of the wars in Afghanistan, and Iraq and around the Mideast, I think a lot of young people are going to war and finding out they were lied to, they were lied to all their lives.
They're not there for freedom. They're not there to fight terrorists.
They're there to further the interests of wealthy individuals, who control the US government, and it is an imperialist government, although we are taught that it's not.
Rick Staggenborg, Retired Psychiatrist, Department of Veterans Affairs
Although not widely admitted, studies show that killing and witnessing wartime atrocities has been a critical factor in soldiers taking their own lives.
Killing in combat has also been associated with alcoholism and in turn, alcoholism is another cause linked to suicide.
It seems that when some soldiers realize that what they are doing in foreign countries is not exporting democracy, but killing innocent people and committing crimes against humanity, they see no other way out of their feelings of guilt.
Accepting that I'm not a part of this big machine, yeah, it was just me, my family, my kids, and I didn’t have no backup.
US Veteran
And young people go in there thinking they're going in for good causes. They find out it's not, they come back, they see the people don't know what's going on in those places, and they don't care, and that the media is lying to us, the politicians lying to us.
That's a lot to overcome when you're a young person struggling with having seen horrible things in your service. I even hesitate to use that word, who they're serving obviously, for it is just in the interests of the rich and powerful and not the country as a whole.
I mean, they come back and there's actually a substantial number of enlisted individuals who are on food stamps. I mean, it's a huge percentage, actually, it's pretty shocking.
And then they come back and they find out that the families can't get health care. It's like I would be asking myself, I think, is this the country I fought for? And the answer obviously, is disturbing.
Rick Staggenborg, Retired Psychiatrist, Department of Veterans Affairs
Now, while it's still more common for white and Native Americans to commit suicide, suicide among black African American youth has seen a sharp rise.
Over the past generation, a mental health crisis has been brewing among black youth.
Suicide attempts among black children Rose 92%, On January 19 of 2019 a 10 Year Old, Seven Bridges, was one of those children.
Michael Lindsey, CBC Emergency Taskforce
Seven was a blessing to everybody that met him, from the day he was born. He was always the star and didn't know it.
Tami Charles, Mother of Seven Bridges
Tammy Charles is Seven's mother. She alleges that physical abuse and racist slurs at school harmed her son's mental state. So throughout 2019 she used Facebook to document her son's struggles.
From a policy perspective, we are doing what it takes to get mental health professionals in every school and not just one professional but proportionate to the number of kids in a school.
We need education campaigns. We need those who have been impacted by the issue, celebrities or athletes, entertainers, to speak openly about their struggles and how they got connected to care.
Michael Lindsey, CBC Emergency Taskforce
Self reported suicide attempts rose by nearly 80% among black adolescents from 1991 through 2019.
While the prevalence of attempts did not change significantly among those of other races, and ethnicities, many experts are shocked and do not know why this has happened.
I think it probably has something to do with socioeconomic factors. More stress as far as their parents paying the bills. Perhaps in fighting in the family may contribute, their environment could contribute.
It's really hard to say definitively right now. It’s something that definitely needs study, with further study and some conclusions about this phenomenon, perhaps it'll lead us into particular treatments that can be effective and try to rectify the situation.
Walt Peretto, Political Analyst
There are other experts who believe that being constantly bullied at school and subjected to racial insults and degradation, coupled with problems in the family and having no one to talk to, no mental health care available, or affordable, and not having bright future prospects and something to look forward to, have all contributed significantly to the increase in suicides among African Americans.
Blacks suffer disproportionately from the factors that I mentioned before. In terms of income and wealth, the income and wealth of black Americans is substantially less from [sic] white Americans. And then on top of that, of course, there's the dealing with racism.
They are much more likely to live in poor neighborhoods where they don't have peers who they can aspire to be like, successful peers that is.
So I think, probably, those are the two main reasons; of course there is accessibility of guns perhaps, certainly, in the poorest neighborhoods, disproportionately black, there are a lot of guns in the hands of criminals.
That is not to say there aren't a lot of guns in the hands of white people in America.
Rick Staggenborg, Retired Psychiatrist, Department of Veterans Affairs
Congress has recently funded a programme to teach middle school pupils, especially, about mental health and suicide prevention intervention called “Success over Stress”, which touches on themes like systemic racism and police brutality to help ninth graders, at predominantly black schools, develop coping skills.
So, what the government does instead of stopping the brutality, bullying, violence, and racism is funding a system to help children cope with it.
So what is the government itself actually doing to stop suicide?
Well, not much that I'm aware of, I mean, there may be some programs that I'm not aware of, but really, because the biggest factor driving recent suicide rates is income inequality. They're actually making it worse. The government's making it worse.
This bill that's supposed to help the middle class, I think they've been taking it and stripping it systematically of things that would help the middle class, and what's left may benefit society as a whole, things like increasing internet access, but there is certainly somebody making a huge profit off that, and everything else has been left in the bill, including tax breaks.
It's a disgrace. American people have to wake up and then realize they're not just being lied to by people in the party they don't belong to, they're being lied to by people in both parties, and the media.
The media sort of determines how wide the discussion was going to be. They'll say what's conservative, what's liberal, and, supposedly, that the truth is somewhere in the middle, but it's not.
The truth is completely outside of that because they're not discussing in the media the most important things like the real costs of war.
Rick Staggenborg, Retired Psychiatrist, Department of Veterans Affairs
Suicide is a serious mental health problem in the US and it won't go away just by setting up help-lines and trying to talk people out of taking their own lives.
The United States doesn't just oppress the people around the world, It oppresses its own people and as long as the oppression, inequality and corruption continues, it should be no surprise to see more mental health problems and suicide among those who simply can't take it anymore.
The following segment is from ‘Power to the People” by Abbas Muntaqi, Political activist and co-founder of the People’s Programs (formerly People’s Breakfast Oakland), a decolonization program that provides meals, a mobile health clinic, and various other resources to the homeless community in Oakland.
Abbas Muntaqim is also the co-creator of Hella Black Podcast, a resource for political education.
Today he shall be sharing his reflections on the disproportionate rate of suicide within the US black community.
Today on Power to the people, we will be examining the issues of mental health as well as suicide in the black community.
If we were going to fully understand the root cause of mental health issues that lead to suicide in the black community, we must understand our history because both settler colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade has had a major impact on our people's mental, physical and spiritual health.
The route of Africans passing away by suicide can be traced all the way back to the slave ships in the Middle Passage.
The middle passage refers to when enslaved Africans were shipped in cramped quarters, hands and feet in chains and shipped to the Americas and the rest of the "New World" forced to work on these genocidal plantations.
The conditions Africans experienced during the Middle Passage was nothing short of torture, and many Africans decided that they would rather jump off a slave ship, knowing that death would be the result instead of remaining enslaved by these Europeans.
There are even documented cases of enslaved Africans stealing gunpowder from the Europeans and blowing themselves up, as well as their European captors.
Africans also use food strikes and the Europeans would attempt to force feed enslaved Africans, much like how they do this to prisoners today who go on hunger strikes to protest genocidal prison conditions.
Thousands of Africans a year would attempt to commit suicide during the Middle Passage, and on the plantation.
White "doctors" refuse to even think Africans could have mental health issues. In 1848 John Galt a so called doctor who was also the Medical Director of the Eastern lunatic asylum in Williamsburg, Virginia said that "blacks are immune to mental illness".
When the European slave master doctors diagnosed Africans with mental health conditions, it was usually only around them resisting orders issued by white supremacists.
For example, Drapetomania was considered to be a mental illness. This was a made up disease that enslaved Africans would be diagnosed with when they made numerous attempts to escape captivity.
And if enslaved Africans were tired and didn't want to be forced to be worked, Europeans diagnosed this as dysaesthesia aethiopica, these Europeans would make up these "diseases" because Africans are freeing themselves and or refusing to work.
This combination of medical racism, slavery, and the transatlantic slave trade sets the foundation for the problem of suicide in our community.
Racism, colonialism, and capitalism, all play major factors in the suicide and mental health epidemic in our community.
Dr. Joy Degruy, in her book Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, argues how slavery has created PTSD like symptoms in the black community.
PTSS refers to a condition that exists as a consequence of the multi generational oppression of Africans and their descendants resulting from centuries of shadow slavery as well as formal slavery, which was predicated on the belief that black people were inherently and genetically inferior to whites.
This was then followed by institutionalized racism, which continues to perpetuate thus resulting in multi generational trauma, which, together, continues to pressure a community devoid of the opportunity to heal or access the benefits available in the society, leading to PTSS, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome.
International jurists have found the United States guilty of genocide and the high suicide rate within our community is directly related to the genocidal conditions of settler colonialism and legalized slavery.
A study found that "black children between the ages of five and 12 are about twice as likely to die by suicide as white children the same age and in young black adults, suicide attempts and ideation is also increasing".
While we know that depression affects everyone, historical reasons for why it affects black people must be understood.
Let's look at some of the facts. 4.8 million black people reported having a mental illness and 22.4% of those 1.1 million people reported a serious mental illness over the past year. Serious Mental Illness rose amongst all ages of black people between 2008 and 2018.
Major depressive episodes increased from 9% to 10.3% in black youth ages 12 to 17 and increased 6.1% to 9.4% in youth ages 18 to 25 and 5.7% 6.3% in the 26 to 49 age range between 2015 and 2018.
This racial trauma is a major reason why we experience this depression. And after the murder of George Floyd, studies found that both depression and anxiety in black people had spiked.
Elsewhere, another study showed that when the death of a black person goes viral, it can trigger PTSD by trauma.
The prison industrial complex is also responsible for producing mental health diseases in black people. Black people are the most incarcerated in America and black men are under more correctional control than when enslaved.
Someone might come into prison without any mental health conditions, prisons can often lead to long lasting mental damage.
Around 50% of the US prison population, over 1 million individuals, have at least one mental health condition and in prison, suicide is one of the leading causes of death.
In America, it's clear that suicide and depression among black people are deeply rooted in the history of racism.
Malcolm X once said, "If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out. That's not progress. The progress is healing the wound at the blow made".
In order for us to truly heal the traumas of mental health and the epidemic of suicide, we have to end the violence of settler colonialism.
We cannot fully heal unless we take the heel of racism off of our necks.
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