death rates of white middle class American males

[pbrower2a]

(02-19-2017, 12:30 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: Are you sure it isn't just being lazy?  Here's the link to the actual study, and here is an abundance of commentary on it.  Just from the first page of the Google search results.


It is truly amazing that the exact same tool that lets you post your questions lets you find the answers, too.

Although lung cancer is down (people simply do not smoke as much) among white non-Hispanic men between ages 45 and 54, deaths from diabetes has risen slightly (obesity associated with bad dietary practice?) . But put together the decline in lung cancer and the rise in diabetes, and one has a slight improvement.

Chronic liver disease, including cirrhosis, is up -- way up, by nearly a quarter. To be sure, cirrhosis is a symptom of diabetes as well as alcoholism, but cirrhosis is heavily linked to alcoholism. Suicides seem up by about three fifths (60%) to two-thirds (66.7%). Poisonings, a rarity for men between 45 and 54 in 2000, is now more common than lung cancer (still a big killer of middle-aged non-Hispanic white men).

How do people get poisoned? Some of it is accidental. Alcoholics have always been prone to accidental poisonings, but the rate of poisoning has far exceeded in growth in death from chronic liver disease, typically a good proxy for alcoholism. Murder? Poisoners exist, but murder by poison is comparatively rare.

I'm beginning to think that much of the poisoning (unless deaths from drug overdoses) is suicide that medical examiners can rule out as murder but can't distinguish between accident and suicide. Tying a rope to one's neck and a beam and jumping from the beam, pointing a gun at one's head and pulling the trigger, or jumping off a bridge or building is too obvious. Poisoning can easily look like an accident. Motivation could be preventing loved ones from feeling shame or guilt, making sure that one's body is not mutilated, or avoiding a finding of suicide that might negate an insurance claim. Depression and despair are usual companions of suicide, whether from economic ruin or from a slow concatenation of misfortunes for which one has no answers.

So what has changed? In 2000, people between the ages of 45 and 54 were Boomers born between 1946 and 1955. In 2015, people between the ages of 45 and 54 were almost entirely Generation X (men in the study having been born between 1960 and 1970), a generation that Howe and Strauss recognized as "troubled" according to such statistical measures as educational non-performance, crime, and arrests for drugs and alcohol in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Under-educated in contrast to older and younger adults, and more likely to have early criminal records, they were more likely to get hit hard in an economic reality that demanded the education that many never got and the athleticism that fades in all people by age 45.

Boomers had causes or often religion. They could find solace in culture. If you are well educated you might find this



or this



a good reason to continue the struggle of life. Maybe both. I'm not much of a lover of fiction -- it had better be good, indeed really good, if I am to keep reading it.

But if one has only a high-school education and never veered far from the populist culture, one might have no cause to maintain a life that has lost all meaning when one's economic role vanishes.

So need we do to make life precious again so that its enjoyment is not over for all practical purposes at age 45?