Celebrity suicides highlight troubling trend in midlife
Mental health issues often going undiagnosed, campaigners say
CHICAGO — The deaths of celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain and fashion designer Kate Spade highlight a troubling trend rising suicides among middle-aged people in the United States.
Mental health problems, often undiagnosed, are usually involved and experts say knowing warning signs and who is at risk can help stop a crisis from becoming a tragedy.
Bourdain, 61, and Spade, 55, died three days and a continent apart this week amid a new report showing an uptick in suicides rates in nearly every state since 1999. Middleaged adults ages 45 to 64 had the largest rate increase, according to the report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Previous studies have suggested economic downturns and the nation’s opioid crisis contributed to the rise in middle-aged suicides.
Christine Moutier, a psychiatrist and chief medical officer for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, said on Friday it’s important for everyone to know the warning signs and to intervene when family members, friends or co-workers appear troubled.
Asking if they’ve had suicidal thoughts is not harmful and lets them know you care, she said.
This week’s report found that many suicides were in people with no known mental illness. But Joshua Gordon, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, said that contradicts years of data, suggesting many have “gone undiagnosed and untreated.
It’s very troubling”.
Gordon said doctors need to ask patients at every opportunity about their mental health and evaluate their risk for suicide.
“When you ask everybody and not just people you might suspect, you double the number you detect,” he said.
Gordon noted that psychotherapy and certain psychiatric drugs have been shown to reduce suicidal tendencies.
Funding trap
Meanwhile, suicide-prevention experts said that efforts to fight suicide in the US are desperate for additional funding.
Federal funding for suicide trailed far behind other major public health issues, even though it is the 10th-leading cause of death among US citizens, claiming one person every 12 minutes, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The National Institutes of Health provided about $35 million in 2017 to fund research into “suicide prevention”, with another $68 million devoted to the category of “suicide”, according to the agency’s statistics.
There were 45,000 US suicides in 2016. In comparison, alcoholism, which killed an estimated 65,000 US citizens in 2015, saw $500 million in funded research last year.
Private charities, which help sustain suicide prevention hotlines, also have a harder time raising funds than those that tackle some other health issues, experts said.
When you ask everybody and not just people you might suspect, you double the number you detect.”
Joshua Gordon, director of the National Institute of Mental Health
“Look at breast cancer. More people will die by suicide than breast cancer this year,” said Dan Reidenberg, executive director of the nonprofit Suicide Awareness Voices of Education.
Almost $690 million was spent on breast cancer research last year, according to NIH statistics.
The US has one of the highest rates of suicide in the world, according to World Health Organization data. In 2015, the country had a rate of 15.3 suicides per 100,000 people, well above the global average of 10.6 per 100,000, according to WHO.