Joblessness and suicide
(CW: suicide.) Joblessness claims went up again last week, making the total 6.6 million claims in the last month. In searching around for the impacts of joblessness in the United States, I came across one pretty sobering effect: suicide.
In a 2011 paper, Classen and Dunn found that joblessness meaningfully correlates with suicide. They found two things, one heartening and the other not so heartening.
First, our measure of recent job loss – the number of workers who have been unemployed less than 5 weeks – exhibits no explanatory power for suicide risk in either gender….This is suggestive that in general, job loss itself does not increase suicide risk. Second, a narrower measure of recent job loss based on mass-layoff events is positively associated with the suicide rate for males and females. We estimate one additional suicide death for every 4200 males who become unemployed as part of a mass-layoff and one additional suicide death for every 7100 females who lose their job as a result of a mass-layoff.
So short-term joblessness doesn’t lead to increases in suicide (it’s actually longer-term joblessness that does it: 15-26 weeks). But perhaps more concerning for us is that mass layoffs do increase suicide, and it impacts women almost a third more than men.
Things get darker when we look at recent suicide rates in the US. It had already been on the rise. The economist had a piece on it Jan. 30. Turns out it had been increasing particularly in rural areas, and that isolation exacerbates the increases.
Using county-level CDC data on the nearly half a million 25- to 64-year-old Americans who committed suicide between 1999 and 2016, the authors found that isolation may be an important factor. In 2016 the suicide rate was 25% higher in rural and less-populated counties (those with fewer than 50,000 people) than in more populous ones (with at least 1m). Fifteen years ago, it was only 10% higher.
So if we put a mass layoff on top of existing rates, we’re likely to see big increases in rural areas. Using Classen and Dunn’s finding, we know there’s an extra suicide for every 4200 males and 1 for every 7100 females.
I’m not sure how to do the math, but I’m imagining 6.6 million jobless claims simultaneously could result in increased suicides particularly in rural areas.