Newswise — When the death of Freddie Mac CFO David Kellerman looked to be a suicide, people wondered whether it was driven by economic stress. In a recession this severe, people ask, does the suicide rate go up? The sad truth is, nobody knows.
Thanks to the power of modern disease surveillance, we can watch the swine flu pandemic unfold before our eyes, minute by minute. Yet there is no equivalent way to monitor suicides.
"People everywhere are wondering if suicides are spiking in response to economic woes, yet we have no reliable system for tracking suicide rates in real-time," said Matt Wray, a sociologist at Temple University and a former Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar at Harvard University.
"There are good reasons to believe rates are rising—perhaps even sharply—but there is no way to know for sure. The most we can say is that suicide is spiking in certain populations, such as Iraq war veterans, and certain cities like Las Vegas, because these statistics are now made available by the officials who track them," he said. According to Wray, official data on suicides are collected by counties and states and forwarded to the National Center for Health Statistics for aggregation and public release, but this is a labor-intensive and time-consuming process. The last year for which national suicide statistics are available is 2005, well before the crash. Under the present reporting system, it will be 2012 or later before we know what happened during the recession of 2008-2009. And, unlike the data related to a virus, even if we did have real-time suicide surveillance, the findings would be murky at best, said Wray. "A big part of the problem is that it's simply not clear who "owns" suicide as a subject of scientific research," he explained.
In the late 19th and early 20th century, suicide was seen as a moral and social problem, and clergy and sociologists were its' main students. But by the 1960s, said Wray, the psychiatric perspective on suicide became predominant, effectively making suicide a medical problem. 90% or more of suicides, psychiatric researchers claimed, were the result of mental illness, usually depression.
"According to the psychiatric perspective, the best way to prevent suicide is to identify and treat the mentally ill. But there are many serious students of suicide who question that diagnosis," Wray said. Today, sociologists are asserting that the roots of suicide may lie not in our genes and neurochemicals, but in our social relationships. Social isolation—the situation of having few attachments to family, friends, and community—may be the ultimate cause. In a recent study, "Leaving Las Vegas: Exposure to Las Vegas and Risk of Suicide," Wray analyzed temporal and geographic patterns of suicide in Las Vegas over a 30 year period. He found that if you live in Las Vegas, but travel away from home, your risk for suicide decreases.
"So, one conclusion we might draw from this fact is that something about the place is toxic or 'suicidogenic,' and that there is something about reduced exposure to Las Vegas that is beneficial," said Wray. "If suicide was just about individuals, those individuals would presumably take their suicide risk with them when they left."
Wray's findings also point toward social isolation as a causal factor. "In addition to being a gambling mecca, Las Vegas was until last year one of the fastest growing metropolitan areas in the U.S., a pattern of growth that may amplify social isolation, fragmentation and low social cohesion, all of which have long been identified as correlates of suicide," he said.
"If the sociologic perspective is the correct one, we should all be worried, because there is evidence that social isolation is on the rise. And while in times of economic disaster, financial losses can bring people together, it certainly can also drive families apart and pitch people into hopelessness and despair," Wray said. The questions surrounding David Kellerman's tragic death make a few things clear, asserts Wray. "With 30,000 Americans each year taking their own lives, we need a national system for better and more timely suicide reporting. The National Violent Death Reporting System, run by the Centers for Disease Control, is a step in the right direction, but this program has been slow to expand—only 17 states are currently involved—and data still take about three years to process. I think the new administration ought to find a way to use stimulus funding to improve on that."
"Equally important," Wray noted, "is the need for new models of psychosocial research that can bridge the scientific divides hampering our knowledge about this terrible fate." Wray is currently working on a book about suicide in Las Vegas.
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