This article appears in the October 5, 2015 issue of National Review.
For more than a hundred years, economists and sociologists have studied an empirical regularity: When the population share of Protestants relative to Catholics rises, suicides increase markedly. Two major theories emerged to explain the pattern. The first rests on theological differences, and holds that Catholics but not Protestants are dissuaded from suicide by the fear that it will lead to eternal damnation. The second is that Protestants are more likely to have weaker ties to the community, and it is this separation from the support of a community that leads to despair and suicide.
While the early literature focused on these two competing forms of Christianity, researchers have begun to explore religion and the role of community more generally. As time has gone on, the community-based rather than theological explanation seems to have become more widely accepted in the literature. For instance, research has found that while Protestants commit suicide more than Catholics, atheists are even more likely to take their own lives than Protestants, an observation that would favor the community-based rather than theological channel.
The idea that community may be an important factor is certainly not a new one. Emile Durkheim’s seminal 1897 monograph Suicide documented that individualism and low levels of community involvement could explain why adherents of certain religious denominations were more likely to commit suicide than others. Studies that use modern data sources and statistics have largely confirmed this notion. One study of 24 EU countries finds that high levels of social capital decrease suicides associated with job loss by 19 percent. Another study examines the possibility of a role for a “sociological channel” in suicide and finds strong evidence that high levels of social cohesion diminish suicide risk even after one controls for a variety of factors, including the frequency of mental and physical illness.
Which brings us to today’s America. With religion on the decline and community engagement waning, the century-old literature might suggest that a surge in suicide could be in store for us. Sadly, the data provide chilling confirmation that the trend is already visible. Americans are bowling alone, and dying alone.
The increase in the incidence of suicide observed in recent years is truly astonishing. Suicide data from the Centers for Disease Control and automotive-fatality data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration show that, in each year since 2009, suicides have killed more Americans than car accidents. In 2013, fatalities from suicides outnumbered those from car accidents by 25 percent, 41,149 to 32,719. It wasn’t always so: In 1975, fatalities from car accidents outnumbered fatalities from suicides by 64 percent, 44,525 to 27,063. If each of the top ten causes of death in the U.S. continues to grow at the rate it has averaged since 1999, when this surge in suicides began, by 2024 more Americans will die from suicide than from flu and pneumonia combined.
The human cost of this tragic increase is unfathomable, yet the surge in suicide has barely received mention in public-policy circles. And even its narrow economic costs are far larger than we generally realize. The chart below shows how the economic burden of fatalities from suicide has evolved between 1975 and 2013 and how it compares with that of automobile accidents. To convert statistics on fatalities into statistics on their economic burden, we use a rule of thumb, developed based on automotive data, that estimates the value of a life at $2.23 million in 2013 dollars. Public policies that save a life are commonly discussed when policymakers discuss automobile safety—and for good reason. At the start of our sample, automobile fatalities cost Americans more than $100 billion per year (in 2013 dollars). In the case of automobiles, these high costs set in motion decades of aggressive research and regulation. The chart indicates that the economic burden of suicide fatalities now approaches the economic burden of automobile fatalities in the days when the latter’s steep toll catalyzed, for instance, the widespread adoption of the passenger airbag.
As Protestantism spread and Catholicism declined in Europe, individuals found themselves increasingly separated from the community support mechanisms that could help sustain them in difficult times. Suicides surged. Today’s coarsening world is having a similar effect on far too many. Suicide has become an urgent public-health crisis with astronomical economic costs.
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