A group of middle-aged whites in the U.S. is dying at a startling rate

[riversedge]

Source: washingtonpost




By Lenny Bernstein and Joel Achenbach November 2 at 5:41 PM

A large segment of white middle-aged Americans has suffered a startling rise in its death rate since 1999, according to a review of statistics published Monday that shows a sharp reversal in decades of progress toward longer lives.

The mortality rate for white men and women ages 45-54 with less than a college education increased markedly between 1999 and 2013, most likely because of problems with legal and illegal drugs, alcohol and suicide, the researchers concluded. Before then, death rates for that group dropped steadily, and at a faster pace.

An increase in the mortality rate for any large demographic group in an advanced nation has been virtually unheard of in recent decades, with the exception of Russian men after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The rising death rate was accompanied by an increase in the rate of illness, the authors wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.



“Drugs and alcohol, and suicide .?.?. are clearly the proximate cause,” said Angus Deaton, the 2015 Nobel laureate in economics, who co-authored the paper with his wife, Anne Case. Both are economics professors at Princeton University.

“Half a million people are dead who should not be dead,” he added. “About 40 times the Ebola stats. You’re getting up there with HIV-AIDS.”

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/a-group-of-middle-aged-american-whites-is-dying-at-a-startling-rate/2015/11/02/47a63098-8172-11e5-8ba6-cec48b74b2a7_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_whitedeaths-319pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory

---

Whow, I did not know about this. Horrible for this to be happening.


?uuid=p3YWcIF6EeWnymq27CD4OQ

[Skittles]

1. my brother was one of them

age 48, alcoholism

[riversedge]

3. so sorry for you and your family. I hope you find some peace

[840high]

12. I am so sorry.

[restorefreedom]

30. .....

[Babel_17]

48. We all likely know someone deeply affected

I'm sorry for your loss. Losing a sibling ...

[Skittles]

60. ...

[leveymg]

63. The 1 percent are literally murdering the rest.

It's literally a fact of life and will lead to a well deserved response.

[Mendocino]

2. I'm 58

I recently attended my 40th class reunion. We have had 20 out of 243 die, just about one out of twelve. That seemed high to me. Cancer and accidents mostly.

[Martin Eden]

9. I turned 58 last month.

College degree, so maybe I'm safe. Two of my close friends died of drugs/alcohol decades ago, but I was able to make it through that phase of my life.

I'm not in great physical condition, but remain very active. Most of my vacation time is spent hiking/backpacking and competing in senior slowpitch softball tournaments. I also play 3 nights a week locally in the summer & fall. Some of the guys in my 40+ league compete in 65+ tourneys, and they're still pretty good. Two of my weeknight leagues are all ages; competing against young guys, I still play the outfield.

I consider myself very fortunate.

[Mendocino]

40. Keeping in shape

Like you I hike and backpack. I also bicycle and canoe. In the winter I xc-ski and work out on a NordicTrack.

I have a old friend also 58, who drinks too much and smokes. He has high BP, overweight, COPD, reduced liver function. He recently had a non-cancerous mass removed from his throat. Doctors tell him to quit both the drinking and smoking or he likely won't live five more years. He doesn't care, sad.

Great that you can still play ball. If I tried that I'd forever be getting sprains and muscle pulls. My old body just doesn't stretch like it use to, so I stick to slow and rhythmic.

[gopiscrap]

17. Same here: I was at my 40th this summer

we had a graduating class of 986 and 193 of those had died

[Mendocino]

41. One out of five

Wow, I thought my class was bad. Big school, my former wife went to one like that. They just had grades 10-12 in their building and totaled a bit under 3000. She is 54.

[wordpix]

4. bad eating habits, too, not to mention food grown with deadly agrotoxins

[jeff47]

8. ...that don't affect other races? (nt)

[Kalidurga]

5. Income inequality kills.

I have known this for a while now. I have recently learned that childhood abuse can lower life expectancy as well even among those who do not grow up to use drugs and/or become diabetic. The cancer rate is higher for adults who were abused as children even if they do everything they can to be healthier. But, even so it's good to try to stay healthy even if the stats are daunting.

[forest444]

7. Bingo.

While it's true that people of any given age group may die of a variety of causes, many of them unavoidable, what's really creating that big gap in outcomes between U.S. middle-age males and their other first-world counterparts after around 2000, is the sheer unaffordability of health care in this country.

I furthermore suspect mortality data in the U.S. would be at or near third-world levels were it not for Medicare, since most deaths in fact occur from age 65 onward. And now, of course, they're trying to take that away too. Amazing.

[byronius]

21. Absolutely. Call them the Shocked Generation.

Destabilized and culled, lost and dissolved.

Very few people expected it. Lost pride, damaged families, and a great deal of right-wing political misdirection and silence. It all has a terrible cost.

[Munificence]

28. I am 45 mysef

and the most shocking thing I see is the number of men in my age group that used to work the "trades" are desperate and unemployed.

I live in a rural firm blue collar area, my two closest neighbors (both the parents of these men) were able to live a firm blue collar lifestyle....but not their sons.

One neighbor gave their son an acre and paid for his small home to be built. Other neighbor has two grown male adults in their 30's living with them. All 3 of these men used to be gainfully employed in the trades making maybe $40K-$50K in incomes when they were younger, now at the going rate of $10-$15 an hour by competing with low wage cash immigrant workers they choose not to work for "cigarette and beer money".

The economy has been stagnant for 10 years now and it is not coming back for middle class folks. Most middle aged men that I know used to have a sense of pride, now they really don't give a shit.

It's all boiling up behind the scenes and has been painted over and manipulated by our government to make it appear to be good (stock market, unemployment, etc) but these men are getting to the point of really not giving a fuck about anything. They have nothing to live for and to me they are a going to be a dangerous group when they finally say "enough is enough".

A lot of them to my surprise voted for President Obama both go-rounds as they really believed in the "shovel ready" jobs which would put the trades back to work. They are not stupid and see that all the money went to the top 1% and are pretty pissed off, can't say that I disagree with them.

They can go be a carpenter, lay tile, do HVAC, etc for around $12-$15 an hour, and you are running all over town have to have all your own tools and van/truck, etc to get that rate and make no mistakes about it, they are good at what they do, they are tradesmen and there are 1000's of them out of work as they can not compete with low wage immigrant labor that is paid in cash. Can't say I blame them.

[byronius]

37. Bush did permanent, irreparable damage to this nation.

And every American that voted Republican is responsible.

[questionseverything]

54. what you relay is sad but true

i see the same thing in central illinois and honestly we are probably better off than most places

[LiberalArkie]

6. Look at the years. Loosing jobs, home and family

Go on http://dailyjobcuts.com take a look, Verizon is cutting big time as I type https://www.thelayoff.com/verizon-communications

Men with 20-30 years at a job, canned so the execs can get a 20mil bones.. Verizon cuts 8,000 jobs in the USA and adds 6,000 in India .

[houston16revival]

10. Diet doesn't help either

[lovuian]

11. It's healthcare and Stress and Medications

Let's face it the American way of Life is very stressful

we are prescribed massive amounts of medications and the healthcare system is built on making the population sicker

The other countries above have Healthcare for all and no one goes bankrupt from hospital bills

We've been through many wars and 911 .....plus new technology ...cell phones and cell phone towers maybe causing health issues as well as other technologies...

[Snarkoleptic]

13. There are numerous studies linking conservative policies and rising mortality rates.

This seems unsurprising as such policies tend to favor profit above all else.

http://jech.bmj.com/content/56/10/723.full

Mortality and political climate: how suicide rates have risen during periods of Conservative government, 1901–2000

Do conservative governments make people want to die?

The paper by Page and colleagues adds to a growing literature that considers the effect of the political environment (whether from the point of view of which political regime holds power or considering in more detail the proportion of population voting for particular parties) and mortality.1,2 In this case the specific cause of death in question is suicide, and the paper thus adds to a long tradition of research in sociology and epidemiology on factors beyond the individual that influence societal rates of suicide.3–5

The findings by Page et al suggest a dose-response or perhaps “true” effect such that during the 20th century the presence of Conservative governments at both State and Federal level in Australia were associated with higher suicide rates. Crucially, the effect is strongest when both levels of government are Conservative, with adjusted relative risks of suicide of 1.17 for men and 1.40 for women compared with years of administration by both State and Federal Labor governments.

and
http://www.politicususa.com/2015/05/04/study-thirty-five-years-conservative-policies-contributed-violence-baltimore.html

....according to a recent report on America’s overall health by the National Research Council (NRC) and the Institute of Medicine (IM); “On nearly all indicators of mortality, survival and life expectancy, the United States ranks at or near the bottom among high-income countries.” This is particularly astonishing because America was once the world leader before conservative policies began destroying America.

The report reveals that it is just not that America is near the bottom of industrialized nations in nearly every category, but how “stunningly fast the United States has lost ground” when it was a world leader just thirty-five years ago. Americans old enough to remember will realize that what changed was Ronald Reagan and Republicans convincing Americans that government was their mortal enemy and that cutting it down to size to give the richest Americans the nation’s wealth was the godly path to prosperity. As the NRC and IM report reveal, this nation’s decline began thirty five years ago when Republicans declared war on the federal government and imposed their trickle down scam on America.

--snip--

According to a New York Times article reporting on America’s decline, it is conservative policies “over the last four decades that are responsible for the unique failure of government to stop the stagnation of the middle class, increasing poverty, and the precipitous decline in our collective health.” It is not, as some conservative economists are wont to claim, globalization and technological advances that damaged American society, wreaked havoc on the middle class, halted investment in infrastructure and education; it was conservative ideology eliminating government and everything it entails in providing support for Americans.

and more
http://themonkeycage.org/2012/01/politics-is-a-matter-of-life-and-death-times-23000/

Republican administrations are “risk factors for lethal violence,” and that the only reason they have not produced “disastrously high epidemic levels” of suicides and homicides is that Democrats have repeatedly undone their damage.

....over the 108 years covered by his analysis (1900-2007), the age-adjusted suicide rate increased by an average of 9.7 per million over each Republican four-year term but decreased by an average of 11.1 per million over each Democratic term. The age-adjusted homicide rate increased by an average of 3.6 per million over each Republican term but decreased by an average of 4.2 per million over each Democratic term.

[eppur_se_muova]

32. Very informative post. I'm currently reading ...

Perlstein's Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon & the Rise of Reagan . Watergate happened when I was in junior high school and much of what happened went right over my head, so it's both new and familiar to me. The background material on Reagan is both fascinating and appalling. How people could be conned by this man is hard to understand -- there were always signs that he was just making up fairly tales as he went, going back to his high school days, if not further.

I always regarded Reagan in office as America's crack cocaine -- he made us feel big and powerful while actually gravely weakening our society from within. The country has never recovered from that abuse, and the opportunities that were lost will never be made up for the generation that survived Reagan.

[smirkymonkey]

33. +1000

Very interesting reads. Thanks!

[TexasBushwhacker]

39. That is fascinating

You have to have hope. I think the wars, the income stagnation, the lack of healthcare, the hatemongering, all those things are death by a thousand cuts for hope. It's not surprising that white males with only high school educations are feeling a loss of status. Their fathers and grandfathers probably made good livings with blue collar jobs. Throw in a divorce or two, alienation from children and you have a recipe for depression and substance abuse.

[Snarkoleptic]

44. This meme sums it up for me - it's more a top/bottom thing and the left/right is oft a distraction.

[ThoughtCriminal]

14. I think a lot of them died of "Anger"

Our culture manufactures outrage and hate at things both real on very toxic level.

[marions ghost]

59. Agree

--the whole country is affected by the hate machine

[Nay]

15. There's not much difference between the Soviet collapse and the

US economic collapse, it's just that we refuse to see it as a collapse and blame it on the individual worker. That hits white men the hardest, and their wives hard, too. Drugs, alcohol, guns, and anger -- a deadly combination.

[Kennah]

20. I daresay healthcare is one big area of difference

Soviet era universal healthcare wasn't on par with say The Netherlands, but in the post Soviet Union world it has deteriorated.

In the US, if you can pay, then you can afford to be sick. If not, then sucks to be you. With my fat, bloated healthcare plan via my AFSCME Union job, wife and I pick and choose doctor visits we can afford to see and when. Even though our plan is arguably the most expensive and generous, it is still cheaper to buy some meds from Canada.

Universal healthcare, even poor universal healthcare, provides a cushion to a plummeting economy. On the night the ACA was upheld by SCOTUS, Lawrence O'Donnell said that the ACA would take the number of uninsured from 50 million down to about 25 million. I don't think the number of uninsured in America is quite yet there.

Under a US collapse, I suspect the effects would be much more dire than under the Soviet Union collapse.

[Nay]

29. Oh, this is very true. Our collapse has not yet been completed, though, so

stay tuned for more bad news. USSR healthcare did indeed cushion their landing, as did the custom of nationalized housing. Even if you lost your job, you still had an apartment. You couldn't be thrown out. Here in the US, not so. Lose your job, lose your housing. No wonder people are killing themselves.

[hedda_foil]

16. This happened in Russia in the decade after the USSR broke up.

People lost all sense of stability and predictability in their lives. The middle-aged men were most affected. Lots of alcoholism and early deaths.

[Capt.Rocky300]

18. Just what the Oligarchs want..........

As Scrooge said, "To decrease the surplus population".

Disgusting, sad and unfair.

[Lazy Daisy]

19. live just long enough

to give your working life making the 1% rich, then die off when it comes time to get a little back

[CountAllVotes]

23. Yep, they pay into the system and die

That is what happened to my brother. Dead & gone at 43 years of age due to cancer and no, he did not use drugs or alcohol.

Sad as all hell and everything he worked for since age 19 is gone.

Its almost like this is baked into the system to be rid of upcoming retirees before they have a chance to retire and collect what is due to them IMO.

[Depaysement]

22. This puts the "war"

in the term class war.

Now men of all ages and races can participate in the capitalist death spiral.

[bemildred]

24. And they keep trying to say that we are not a nation in decline.

We have the demographics of a nation in decline, we have the buffoons in politics of a nation in decline, we have the corruption of politics of a nation in decline, we have the failed overseas adventures of a nation in decline, we have the failing infrastructure of a nation in decline, and we have the oligarchic rule of a nation in decline. Our education and health care systems suck. I can go on.

And we used to be the best (except for the racism).

But it was all said in 2003 or so by Emmanuel Todd in "After the Empire".

http://www.amazon.com/After-Empire-Breakdown-Perspectives-Criticism/dp/B00EBFVSOC

And all these goober "conservatives" have brought about themselves the early decline of "America" they sought to fend off and deny.

"Mission Accomplished".

[GreatGazoo]

25. "poisoning" showed the biggest increase

followed by suicide. They don't break out what constitutes poisoning but I'm going to assume they don't mean someone intentionally poisoned these people so that leaves a kind of self-induced poisoning. They mention "legal drugs" and a link between being prescribed legal pain meds and the first use of heroin.

I have seen neighbors who were prescribed various medications that cannot be consumed with alcohol. Their doctors prescribe these meds even though they know, or should know, that these people are active alcoholics. So I'm wondering if those kinds of interaction get lumped under poisoning (?)

There is no effective treatment IMHO for alcoholism. AA is unscientific, faith-based, unproven and pervasive. AA seems to have eclipsed other programs which may be more effective (how could they be worse?) and this is a condition which affects millions of Americans. Alcohol is poison. I would be curious to see if the stats are any different for post-marijuana legalization Colorado. Specifically, is there less death from drug interactions and alcohol when you have more use of MJ and less alcohol?

[rogerashton]

53. it said "drug and alchohol poisoning." eom

[think]

26. Income inequality kills...

[VanillaRhapsody]

27. Stress...

they got to "enjoy" some of the food on the table kind of stress that Women and Minorities experience ALL the time.....

[restorefreedom]

31. so the "most advanced" country on earth

is ahead in yet another awful metric in human health. and people don't get the link to health care access and single payer with better health for all......

[n2doc]

36. But we need to be safe from terrorists!

That's why we need trillion dollar f-35 programs and 70 billion dollar wealth bomber programs and 45 million dollar natural gas filling stations in Afghanistan. Freedom!

[restorefreedom]

38. yup. all about priorities

and we know where the priorities of the mic are.

[daleo]

34. 45 to 65 are dangerous years for the working class, of any color

The body begins to wear out, but pensions are still very far off. The capitalist system tends to shut people out, at that point. The psychological effects can be quite dire as well. U.S. workers are more vulnerable than most, given the scanty social welfare network.

[AngryAmish]

35. The generation was sold a bill of goods.

I'm lucky. I made it.

But a lot of my peers are committing suicide. Fast by hanging or in a car in the garage, or slow through booze.

Life is not fun for many. Everything is our problem.

[flamingdem]

42. Why? What was the bill of goods?

It seems like the ones coming up now have it worse but in some ways they support each other more than we did. They have access to information too.

[Sunlei]

43. alcohol abuse, it is very addictive and people do get physicially sick if they try to quit cold.

IMO, alcohol also causes problems in baby development, especially the first trimester.

[awoke_in_2003]

62. Alcohol abuse is a symptom...

not the disease.

[niyad]

45. a very sad k and r

[hatrack]

46. Job Loss, Long-Term Financial Stress, Depression, Opioids, Alcohol And All The Anxiety You Can Eat

That's 'Murka!

[Mnemosyne]

55. +1,000,000,000,000... nt

[marions ghost]

61. yep

that's Murka--

That graph tells the story in a nutshell.

[Babel_17]

47. Poverty, anxiety, and despair, are still advancing

Where once we thought we had a sense of how to roll it back in all the communities neglected by society and our economy, we instead see this condition deepen its roots, and spread.

It just wears people out and it wears them down. Year after year of things not looking up, but looking more gloomy.

Our society over the last hundred years or so has had a shift in its values as to what we value. Genteel poverty has completely fallen out of fashion. I give a lot of credit to the youngest generations, they're rediscovering the true value of being alive.

But for us older, and much older, types it's a heavy weight to bear when most of the measures you're used to applying to yourself don't have anything good to say. And that's just the top layer of the onion, the basic psychological one. There's your raw emotions and then there's the practical matters of being in poverty. That can be a daily grind of bad options and sub-standard diet, health care, heating, and the appearance you can present to the world.

It's a grinding down of our economy; we've been ignoring the implications, and ignoring some of the ways of dealing with it.

[Babel_17]

49. List of Endangered Pensions (I thought of giving it a thread)

(Anyone knowledgeable on this topic who can flesh it out, please think about starting a thread on it.)

http://www.dol.gov/ebsa/criticalstatusnotices.html

Click on some of the "Critical" ones. It doesn't take much intuition to figure out how grim this is. And these are funds of Unions that used to be bedrock institutions. I read several of the reports, some use different language. A few are in crash and burn territory and strongly suggesting existing pensioners are looking at facing cuts. Others are making earning credits harder, and/or making other cuts. Bear in mind, afaik none of these pensions have any COLA, so inflation has already had its way with them. Mine doesn't, and it's defined payment was last set something like twenty years ago and hasn't been increased since. (though we did start an annuity fund that gradually saw some increases)

As you might have guessed, yeah, I have some concern about my pension, though it's only "Endangered". I'm pretty sure we turned the corner, and I'm grateful I was able to make it to qualifying for one. Tough times for our industry, and we're doing more with less.

So many guys a mess, bad backs and joints, fatty livers, bypasses, bits of cancer, high blood pressure, pre-diabetic or diabetic, and all the stress. I went to an OSHA meeting where the instructor said "Everybody who's an "XYZ" worker raise your hand." He then pointed at each of us and said "You're dead, you're dead, you're dead, (etc.)" till he had pointed at each of us. I don't want to name my field but I think he was just unofficially telling us the truth because he felt obligated. Three guys I worked next to died of lymphatic cancer. One died of a heart attack on the job. One got buried alive and died.

Stress is a killer.

P.S. My sympathies to members of the Central States Pension Fund. All of us in a Multiemployer Pension Fund now live with the awareness that, though retired, our pensions can be cut.

http://www.pensionrights.org/issues/legislation/summary-pension-cutback-provisions-omnibus-spending-law

[appalachiablue]

50. Since the year 2000, the US has lost 60,000 factories that have gone overseas.

NAFTA, the North American Trade Agreement went into effect on Jan. 1, 1994. The trade agreement was passed by the Congress in Nov. 1993 and on Dec. 8 President Bill Clinton signed it saying 'NAFTA means jobs. American jobs, and good paying American jobs. If I didn't believe that, I wouldn't support this agreement.'

[merrily]

51. Another reason a college education should be free.

[Babel_17]

56. Yes, and we also need trade schools and infrastructure work

Jump start the economy and create more good jobs. We can't all be white collar or techies. Unions have built the training facilities, now create the opportunity for jobs.

[Warpy]

52. Piss poor healthcare combined with no hope for retirement

Depression goes untreated and there is a list of physical problems that coexist with depression.

This shouldn't be a mystery to anyone. This country is sick. It has become a hell for working people and white males have seen their income fall fastest of all.

[LiberalEsto]

58. +1000! n/t

[haele]

57. Stress, depression, and anger are toxic.

And people who don't have a college education, working dead end jobs, with little money have few outlets to purge themselves of internal toxins. Especially when the only option to wind down and experience just the joy of living that their community gives them is perhaps a few moments of real prayer when they're attending their temples for Fox News Conservatives who call themselves Christians. There is very little available to help them that doesn't need to be bought, and is out of their reach.

Constantly told to be afraid of "the other", afraid for their jobs, afraid for the bootstraps they are told they supposedly have - if they stay in line and believe hard enough - God will bless them with what they need. Who cares about that musty old golden rule - that's for liberals and weak-minded freaks. Gotta be hard and protect what's yours for the bank or hedge fund that owns you and your job.

Once these people start falling, it's a quick downwards slide. The organizations that are sucking the life out of them will just toss them aside as useless and weak - and tell everyone that it's a person's own fault for failure. Not the system that has control over their communities working against them to deny them any humanity or worth other than the money they can make for someone higher up the food chain.

Haele

[jtuck004]

64. Maybe they decided "hope" was just a marketing scheme. n/t

[GOLGO 13]

65. Good Union (with pension), Work out like a beast & being the best dad I can be

Avoid garbage food, drink rarely & never cared for drugs. I have good hobbies (play guitar, Judo, falconry, archery & thinking about taking blacksmithing lessons)

My couch is mostly for guests.