America’s mental-health crisis drove suicides to a record-high number last year.
Nearly 50,000 people in the U.S. lost their lives to suicide in 2022, according to a provisional tally from the National Center for Health Statistics. The agency said the final count would likely be higher. The suicide rate of 14.3 deaths per 100,000 people reached its highest level since 1941.
The record reflects broad struggles to help people in mental distress following a pandemic that killed more than one million in the U.S., upended the economy and left many isolated and afraid. A shortage of healthcare workers, an increasingly toxic illicit drug supply and the ubiquity of firearms have facilitated the rise in suicides, mental-health experts said.
“There was a rupture in our economic health and social fabric. We’re still experiencing the aftereffects of that,” said Jeffrey Leichter, a psychologist who connects mental health and primary care at Sanford Health, an operator of hospitals and clinics in the Dakotas, Minnesota and Iowa.
Read it all (cited by my colleague Jonathan Bennett in his Sunday sermon).
More people in the U.S. killed themselves last year than ever before. “There was a rupture in our economic health and social fabric. We’re still experiencing the aftereffects.” https://t.co/6p3RIZnT7l https://t.co/6p3RIZnT7l
— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) November 29, 2023