A Big, Big Problem

UPDATE: It wasn't included in Significant Digits, but it should have been:

"Defying Prevention Efforts, Suicide Rates Are Climbing Across the Nation"

Suicide rates rose steadily in nearly every state from 1999 to 2016, increasing 25 percent nationally, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Thursday. In 2016, there were more than twice as many suicides as homicides.

[snip]

The C.D.C. found that men accounted for three-quarters of all suicides, and women one-quarter. The numbers were highest among non-Hispanic whites, and among those aged 45 to 65 years old.

Previous C.D.C. reports have found rate increases of 80 percent among white, middle-aged women since 1999, and of 89 percent among Native Americans. The rates declined slightly among black men and people over age 75 during that time.

Suicide rates have waxed and waned over the country’s history and tend to reach highs in hard times. In 1932, during the Great Depression, the rate was 22 per 100,000, among the highest in modern history. The rate in the new C.D.C. data was 15.4 per 100,000.

The past three decades have presented a morbid puzzle. Rates have risen steadily in most age and ethnic groups, even as rates of psychiatric treatment and diagnosis have also greatly increased.

****

Here's something noteworthy from today's Significant Digits:

1.5 percent of all American deaths
A new study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association attributes 1.5 percent of all American deaths in 2016 to opioids. This staggering figure, which given the data used may be an underestimate of the true total, eclipses the deadliness of the Vietnam War during its bloodiest year. One in five deaths of young Americans, ages 25 to 34, are attributed to opioids. [The Washington Post]

In a post from March of 2016 devoted to the Beatle's Sgt. Pepper's I said, "I have my own hypothesis about this pervasive atmosphere of pain and hopelessness we find ourselves in today; it is highly speculative, to the point of being located solidly on the lunatic fringe."

I never got around to saying what this hypothesis is. At least I can't remember if I did. It has to do with the proliferation of electronic pollution, but also with our frozen political paradigm.

We are the body electric. Hold a Gaussmeter up to your head and you'll get a reading.

But we are also creatures who possess self-consciousness. Being human has a lot to do with our ability to think about our own cognition. We can conceive of a horizon, in the hemeneutic sense,

The horizon is the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point... A person who has no horizon is a man who does not see far enough and hence overvalues what is nearest to him. On the other hand, "to have an horizon" means not being limited to what is nearby, but to being able to see beyond it.

What I'm saying is that through a marriage of technology and decades-long political stasis our sense of a horizon has been obliterated. Since this horizon is key to our humanity, the fact that it is gone or radically truncated is a big, big problem.