⚕️ Physical Health & Deaths of Despair

⬅️ Hub: Boy Crisis MOC

Injury deaths, suicide, life expectancy, murder, deaths of despair, prison.

Physical Health

Injury Deaths

The New Race Gap in Drug Overdose Deaths: The Rising Toll on Black Men - American Institute for Boys and Men

• The opposite of addiction is connection.
  Unnatural Male Deaths: Fatal Injuries and the Rise of Drug Overdoses - American Institute for Boys and Men
• Reeves presents startling statistics: since 2001, over 400,000 American men have died from drug poisonings, a figure roughly equivalent to U.S. male casualties in WWII​.
• Most of the increase in male mortality from unnatural causes (suicide, overdose, homicide, car crashes) is driven by drug overdoses, often linked to opioids or synthetic drugs.

Suicide

• 4x higher than women
• Divorced men is 8x more than divorced women
• Two most commonly used words in suicide notes are: Useless & Worthless
• Many of these overdoses blur the line between accidental and suicidal, highlighting what Reeves calls a “retreat” phenomenon—a broader pattern of men checking out of society emotionally, economically, and physically
• There’s a discussion on how society reacts differently to suffering: e.g., if forced to choose who to support, people may favor someone currently suffering from cancer over someone who has previously attempted suicide.
• This reflects a deep societal discomfort or stigma toward mental illness and suicidal behavior, especially among men.
• The National Academy of Sciences reports that the increase in suicide among white males led to as many white males’ lives lost to suicide as have been lost to AIDS. Anne Case and Angus Deaton, “Rising Morbidity and Mortality in Midlife Among White NonHispanic Americans in the 21st Century,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, no 49 (201): 1078, doi:10.1073/pnas.118393112.
• Only Native Americans commit suicide at rates similar to whites; Hispanics and Asian Americans commit suicide at about one-third the rate of whites—about the same rate as the African American population. Suicide Prevention Resource Center, “Rate of Suicide by Race/Ethnicity, United States 20002014,” in “Racial and Ethnic Disparities” (summarized from WISQARS Fatal Injury Reports, 1999–2014), http://www.sprc.org/racial-ethnic-disparities.
• at the height of the Depression, 14 men committed suicide for each 100 women. 8 Yet by 201, in good economic times, boys and men were committing suicide three and a half times more often than women.
• Men “faking” suicide so insurance pays out. Numbers underreported
• Is this because females are inherently better at handling stress? Perhaps not. When men and women are exposed to similar pressures to perform, as among men and women in the military, the female suicide rate soars almost as high as the male rate. Alan Zarembo, “Suicide Rate of Female Military Veterans Is Called ‘Staggering,’” Los Angeles Times, June 8, 201, http://latimes.com/nation/la-na-female-veteran-suicide2010608-story.html. Female veterans commit 28.7 suicides for each 32.1 committed by male veterans.
• Suicide now takes “more lives than war, murder, and natural disasters combined, stealing more than 36 million years oI healthy liIe” around the world.
• the rate oI increase in male suicide in India is growing at more than nine times that of female suicide (37 percent versus 4 percent since 2000).
• 9x boys compared to girls in India
• 2015: More men died by suicide in the United Kingdom than all British soldiers died in war since 1945

People thinking girls are committing more Suicide Incorrectly

Richard Reeves:
It’s a brilliant book about depression. Wonderful writer. And he has the cover story in The New Yorker—from whenever this will be published—and it’s titled “The Teen Suicide Crisis.”

I was like, “Oh, Andrew Solomon’s written about the teen suicide crisis.” A lot of it’s about social media, etc. But as I’m reading it, I’m getting progressively madder. There are five case studies of tragic suicides—truly heartbreaking—and four of them are girls.

Worse than that is how he handles the statistics. He writes:

“Between 2007 and 2019, the rate of teen suicides rose by 62%.”

The very next sentence:

“The share of girls who say they’ve considered suicide has risen by X since Y and is now two-thirds.”

Then he says, “Some groups, like LGBTQ youth, are at high risk.”

And that’s it—that’s the stats section.

What he’s done, which I’ve seen many people do, is state the actual suicide rate without breaking it down by gender, and then cite the self-reported mental health data with gender breakdowns. That leaves the reader with the impression that the teen suicide crisis is much worse for girls than boys.

But in fact, out of every 5 teen suicides, 4 of them are boys.

That’s irresponsible. And here you have one of the most well-informed journalists on mental health writing for one of the world’s most authoritative and notoriously fact-checked publications, The New Yorker, giving an entirely misleading impression.

It’s not an exaggeration, in my view, to call that misinformation.

It’s impossible to read that essay—if you don’t know the underlying data—and not come away thinking this crisis is hitting girls harder than boys. When in reality, it’s exactly the opposite.

Any parent who reads that and comes to the conclusion that their teen girl is at higher risk than their teen boy has been, in my view, willfully misled.

And actually, this is one area where I think things have gotten worse. I went back and looked at a New Yorker article from 10 years ago, also on suicide. It was much more balanced—and written by a woman.

Chris Williamson:
Why do you think that is?

Reeves:
I think what’s happened is that the attention on teen girls’ mental health—which is important and needed—has created a self-perpetuating cycle of ignorance. People become so focused on those issues, they assume that must also be the demographic at highest risk for suicide.

So when I tell people that teen boys are four times more likely to die by suicide than teen girls, they push back: “No, no, didn’t you see that CDC thing?”

And I say, “Yes—I did.”

But what they saw was the subjective, self-reported measures—sadness, anxiety, suicidal ideation. And to be clear, those are real issues. But I also read the CDC’s actual suicide mortality data a month later, which got no press release, no webinar, no rollout.

So it’s not the public’s fault. If all the media coverage is skewed, of course you come away thinking the crisis is worse for girls. But in absolute numbers, the rise in suicides among boys is significantly higher.

That’s deeply frustrating to me. I’ve made no progress getting the CDC or others to address this.

But when someone like Andrew Solomon—whom I admire—writes a piece like that in The New Yorker, it justifies me spending a little of my “mad as hell” budget.

Life Expectancy

American men are dying younger. - by Richard V Reeves

Murder

1. Mass Shootings
   1. “The rate of mass shootings has tripled since 2011.” Rate of Mass Shootings Has Tripled Since 2011, Harvard Research Shows – Mother Jones

Physical

1. 150 workers die from hazardous working conditions. And 92 percent of them are male.
2. The less formal education and more children your son has, the more likely he is to feel he’ll help his family live a better life by risking his own life working in what might be called “the death professions.”
3. Few parents realize, as they proudly watch their son don a firefighter’s uniform, that in hazardous professions, death after the job takes twelve times as many of our sons’ lives as death on the job.
4. The US has the highest rate of overweight males among all major countries.
5. When evolutionary biologist Randolph Nesse looked at the results of the twenty-country study of premature deaths among men referenced earlier, he concluded, “If you could make male mortality rates the same as female rates, you would do more good than curing cancer.”
   1. The average global life expectancy for girls is about 7 percent greater than for boys.
6. In 1920 American boys and men lived just one year less than women; 3 today, American boys and men live almost five fewer years (females, 81.6; males 76.9). 4 Yet the male-female liIe expectancy gap has grown almost 400 percent.

Deaths of Despair

Of Boys and Men _ Why the Modern Male Is S - Reeves, Richard copy, p.85 (file not included in this release)

rise in deaths of despair among middle-aged, less- educated whites.

Of Boys and Men _ Why the Modern Male Is S - Reeves, Richard copy, p.85 (file not included in this release)

deaths of despair are almost three times higher among men than women

Of Boys and Men _ Why the Modern Male Is S - Reeves, Richard copy, p.87 (file not included in this release)

“Men in particular felt the loss not only of income but also of dignity that accompanied a good job,” write Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, authors of Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope, a study of communities hit hardest by recent economic trends. “Lonely and troubled, they self-medicated with alcohol or drugs, and they accumulated criminal records that left them less employable and less marriageable. Family structure collapsed.”

Of Boys and Men _ Why the Modern Male Is S - Reeves, Richard copy, p.87 (file not included in this release)

men account for almost 70% of the opioid overdose deaths in the U.S. Almost half the prime-age men out of the labor force in 2016 said they had taken pain medication the previous day, mostly at prescription strength, according to a survey analyzed by Princeton economist Alan Krueger.

Of Boys and Men _ Why the Modern Male Is S - Reeves, Richard copy, p.88 (file not included in this release)

I think opioids are just as much a barometer of social problems as they are a cause.

Of Boys and Men _ Why the Modern Male Is S - Reeves, Richard copy, p.88 (file not included in this release)

They are not drugs of inspiration or rebellion, but of isolation and retreat. One reason that so many people die from opioid overdoses is that users are typically indoors, and very often alone.

Of Boys and Men _ Why the Modern Male Is S - Reeves, Richard copy, p.89 (file not included in this release)

In a study of suicides, Australian researcher Fiona Shand and her colleagues looked at the words or phrases that men who have attempted suicide most often used to describe themselves.17 At the top of the list were useless and worthless. The true cause of the male malaise, I believe, is not lack of labor force participation but cultural redundancy.

Prison

1. 93 percent are male and are disproportionately young
2. We are  percent of the world’s population with almost 2 percent of the world’s prisoners. 16 The APA estimates half of those prisoners have mental health problems.
3. Cost
   1. Prison spending has increased at Iive times the rate oI spending per grade school student. Saki Knafo. “Prison-Industrial Complex? Maybe It’s Time for a Schools-Industrial Complex,” Huffington Post, August 31, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/30/californiaprisons-schools_n_3839190.html.
   2. twenty-three new prisons have been built for every one new college since 1980 Knafo, “Prison-Industrial Complex?”
4. the gap in sentencing is six times greater Ior men versus women than it is for blacks versus whites.