Something is troubling the American Mind
If you add up the citizens of Australia, South Korea, Canada, France, Germany and the United Kingdom you’ll get a population roughly the same size as the United States (you can go ahead and double-check, but it’s about 320 million). Last year we had 33,500 gun deaths. They had 2,000.
To say America has a troubled relationship with guns would be an understatement.
Once again we were reminded about this dark side of our nature when a Jason Aldean concert was turned into a target practice. The tragedy had all the usual theatrics of a modern mass shooting; the thoughts and prayers from politicians and celebrities, the calls for legislative action, the reflexive consideration of the shooter as a ruthless monster instead of as a human being who lost himself, and one other trait that’s been true of Columbine, Sandy Hook, and over 40% of all US mass shootings from 2009–2016: in the end, the shooters kill themselves.
The issue no one talks about.
In the United States, we tend to focus on mass shootings, terrorism, and police-related killings, yet those shootings represent a relatively small sliver of those 33,000 firearm deaths every year.
Surprisingly, it’s suicide that accounts for nearly 2/3 of that total.
What does it say about our society when the most real danger of firearms isn’t a fundamental extremist, or a troubled white man, or a gang-police incident, but using it on ourselves?
Suicide is the 2nd leading cause of death for Americans between 25–34, and that rate is increasing. In all, more Americans have taken their own lives than have died in an American war.
The ripples of this disturbing rise are now being felt across our entire society. Last year it was reported that suicide was a major contributor to the decline in the life expectancy of white Americans, and for the first time this millennium, the overall US life expectancy has declined.
Although one of the known deterrents for suicide prevention is to take away the methods of causing ones harm, and half of the 44,000 suicides every year are caused by firearms, this is not a call to action around gun control. Trying to untangle the gun culture that is woven through this country is proving to be like unwadding bubble gum from electrified barbed wire. This is an examination of another part in those stories, one that touches to the heart of many of us, and addresses just how we use those firearms that we argue about so much.
The Link.
90% of people who commit suicide have experienced a mental disorder.
If you really think about it, that correlation shouldn’t come as a galloping shock, but what’s more alarming is just how common mental disorders are. At any given moment, roughly one in seven of the world’s 7.5 billion people is struggling with mental illness. Anxiety, the most common mental health disorder in the US, affects nearly 30% of adolescents and adults.
It gets worse among young people. Last year, the American College Health Association reported that over 50% of college students had felt like “things were hopeless” at some point in the last 12 months. “Hopeless” is a suicide buzzword, and that is a rate that has risen over the last 5 years.
Of course the term “mental illness” covers a wide variety of conditions– depression, anxiety, bi-polar, schizophrenia, anorexia (just to name a few)– and someone who is feeling anxiety is not afflicted in the same way as someone who premeditates a mass shooting, but the issues share the same spectrum.
Yet for such a widespread and devastating problem, we are doing very little to address it. Not only does the media rarely report on suicides (unless it accompanies a multiple homicide) but mental health research receives about half the funding of physical diseases on a similar scale. And this is not just a social issue, while many people will readily acknowledge experiencing depression or anxiety, far fewer seek professional, focused treatment for these feelings.
The Upside.
For all that’s bleak and dark about Americans, one thing that we are good at is solving problems when applying coordinated focus. Over the past 20 years (the same period that suicide has increased) deaths from breast cancer and heart disease– the biggest killer in America– have dropped by 40%. AIDS is now considered as a chronic disease similar to diabetes or arthritis, and the 5-year survival rate for Leukemia has nearly doubled.
The common trait of all these remarkable success stories is significant funding targeted towards developing early detection, early treatment practices. Suicide is not the same kind of disease as these others, but simple interventions can have similar results. Multiple studies have shown that proactive outreach, along with reduced access to “learned fearlessness” outlets, such as drugs, ligature points like shoelaces (and yes, firearms) can significantly reduce suicide rates.
The BFD.
Gun control and healthcare. Climate change and tax policy. Nuclear foreign relations and immigration. These are all important issues worthy of exploration and focus, but what if it’s hopeless? What if we have built a world that pushes the wrong kinds of values, a capitalist system that feeds on our inherent insecurities and cannot be turned off? Maybe we are surrounded by people we could never possibly agree with, because they can’t see anyone’s perspective but their own. Maybe the “worse case scenario” is our current reality.
If you’re one of those people who thinks that none of the million problems in the world are your problem except your problems, if your estimation of your ability to contribute to something greater than yourself is futile, then perhaps it’s time to look within. Because this existential frustration we all feel goes beyond the social issues of our time, or the chemical imbalances in our brains, or the video games we played as kids.
The most obvious realities are the ones we don’t talk about.
Like firearms, suicide deaths are higher in the United States than most other developed countries, including the ones that were listed at the top of this article. We are a generation raised to believe that we were the best, trained to push ourselves to be better every day. It’s one of the best things about being American, but that competitiveness and drive can drown us if we don’t have a good idea of who we are and solid direction of where we’re going.
Education, debate, and social reform will only get us so far, in the end it comes down to how you are showing up, and how you control the things that are within your power to do so. I’m not sure how any of this works, but if your mind is troubled in the state it’s in, then it’s time to challenge the assumptions about who you are and how you see the world. Because like any mental disorder– from depression and anxiety to Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s– behavior is the last thing to change, and unless we start to seriously address what’s troubling the American mind, it’s going to swamp us.
