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Why Suicide Has Become an Epidemic--and What We Can Do to Help

• a3n 13y ago
  "Almost the entire rise—as both the new CDC and GBD numbers show—is driven by changes in a single band of people, a demographic once living a happy life atop the human ziggurat: men and women 45 to 64, essentially baby boomers and their international peers in the developed world." "When teen suicide was on the rise in the 1970s and 1980s, society was stung by the conclusion that something must be wrong with the way we live, because our children don’t want to join us." These are the same people. The teenage cohort of the 70s and 80s are the middle aged cohort of today. Were we drinking poisoned baby formula in the 50s and 60s?
  • dragonwriter 13y ago
    > These are the same people. The teenage cohort of the 70s and 80s are the middle aged cohort of today. Were we drinking poisoned baby formula in the 50s and 60s? Probably not. Instead, these people were reaching their teen years at the time that the relative progress of the middle class slowed and stalled, and have lived their entire adult life through the relative decline of the middle class. There is probably no generation with a greater contrast between the expectation of progress ingrained in their childhood (and the expectations communicated by their parents based on those parents life experience) and their own experience of their teen to adult life.