Leon Broussard IV. Photo: Jessica Padilla This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.
The groundbreaking research on deaths of despair by Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton found that they rose markedly among middle-aged white people from 1999–2013 across the nation, in both rural and urban areas.
Graphic: by Intelligencer Though the exact increase in suicides among people of color across the U.S. last year won’t be known until the CDC releases its complete data, survey data it already collected asking adults about their mental health during the pandemic showed increases in thoughts of suicide and substance use among Black and Latino people at rates that were roughly twice as high as among white respondents.
As with suicides, national overdose-death data by race from 2020 will not be released by the CDC for some time, although it did release a bulletin announcing a large increase in deaths in preliminary data. Combined, drug-overdose deaths and suicides increased by 45 percent among Black people in the sample, 42 percent among Latinos, 25 percent among Asians, and 13 percent among white people.
Dr. Caroline Silva, a professor in the psychiatry department of the University of Rochester, said one possible reason for a decline in white suicide rates in these nine counties may have been that COVID-19 was causing deaths among older white people who are otherwise most likely to take their own lives. “COVID is resulting in a lot of deaths among older adults, and older adults in the white population are also the ones who are at highest risk for death by suicide.