Professors find a link between economy, suicide rates
Legends have popularized a narrative that had droves of Wall Street big-shots jumping to their deaths following the 1929 stock market crash that sent the United States spiraling into the Great Depression.
A recent study conducted by two Rutgers sociologists suggests some truth to the myth, finding a link between increased suicide rates and the recession of years.
Assistant Rutgers professors Julie Phillips and Katherine Hempstead, both social demographers in the Department of Sociology, published their study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine on Feb. 27.
The data revealed a staggering 40 percent increase in suicides among 40 to 60-year-old Americans in the past 16 years.
Phillips, who also holds a joint appointment in the Department of Sociology and the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research, said a number of studies published in the last few years motivated her and Hempstead to dig deeper into the issue.
“These studies indicate that the impact has been especially large for middle-aged suicide rates,” Phillips said. “However, these are all studies conducted at the aggregate level, and so it’s possible that the ecological fallacy is at play.”
With the goal of finding whether there is a relationship between the economy and acts of suicide found at the group level carry over to the individual level, Phillips and Hempstead used data from the National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS).
They wanted to see if there has been an increase in suicides as a result of the Great Recession of 2005 to 2010, which resulted in a loss of consumption and market chaos following the collapse of the housing bubble.
“We expected to find that suicides … would increase over the period and would be concentrated among the middle-aged, since those in this age group are often the breadwinner with dependents to support …” Phillips said.
The National Violent Death Reporting System, a state-based, active surveillance system that collects a complete census of all resident and occurrent violent deaths, uses information from a plethora of sources, such as coroner reports, death certificates and hospital records.
Phillips said the data also provides a report of the specific circumstances of individual suicides, which Phillips and Hempstead divvied into three groups: personal circumstances, interpersonal problems and external influences, such as employment and financial difficulties and “justice issues.”
Phillips’ and Hempstead’s study found that while externally motivated suicides are less common than suicides resulting from personal circumstances, nearly a third of suicides from 2005 to 2010 were caused by external factors, which suggests a strong correlation between the recession and instances of suicide.
Externally motivated suicides, which the study found was more common among men, jumped from 32 percent in 2005 to 37.5 percent in 2010, according to the study.
In line with Phillips and Hempstead’s initial hypothesis, the number of suicides with economic motivations rose 5 percent between 2005 and 2010. Middle-aged suicide deaths were most pronounced, followed by suicides in the elderly demographic.
Suicides by suffocation also saw an increase, according to the Center for Disease Control.
“We explored whether suicide circumstance is related to method. We find that suffocation suicides have increased over the period most dramatically among the middle-aged and tend to be more common among suicide deaths with external circumstances,” Phillips said.
Phillips also said suffocation as a mechanism increased for all groups, but was significantly higher in middle-aged and externally motivated suicides.
“This poses a challenge for prevention since (suffocation) is a method of suicide that requires relatively little planning and is accessible to virtually everyone.”
Hempstead echoed Phillips' comments in an article from Rutgers Today, confirming the study used a unique data set, which revealed an increase in suicides among middle-aged people where financial or economic distress is cited as a contributing factor.
Both Hempstead and Phillips hope the study’s findings will increase awareness and prevent future increases in suicides during times of economic strain.
In terms of suggestions for prevention efforts, Phillips cited human resource departments, employee assistance programs, state and local employment agencies and credit counselors as viable options.
“The individuals with job or financial problems are more likely than those with personal circumstances to have experienced a crisis in the past two weeks,” Phillips explained. “A timely intervention could really help with prevention.”
