Americans Are Living Longer: Life Expectancy Has Increased, But Our Mental Health Is In Definite Decline
Dying is inevitable, but Americans have become experts at prolonging the end of their life. A new life expectancy report released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has found people are living longer with lower rates of death.
Almost any disease or disorder that’s considered a leading cause of death has dropped or plateaued its life-threatening numbers, except for one grim reaper: suicide. For the first time in 25 years, suicide rates have hit their highest, and figures have just been on an upward climb since 2000, and according to CDC’s Robert Anderson, “it’s really hard to say why.”
The suicide rate has been increasing higher and higher, and researchers aren’t sure what the reason is behind people taking their own lives. It’s a seemingly convoluted juxtaposition of people surviving diseases that are completely out of their control, while others are taking control back by committing suicide.
“Many people who commit suicide do so without letting on they are thinking about it or planning it,” Dr. Michael Miller, assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, said in a Harvard Health Blog. The paradox is that the people who are most intent on committing suicide know that they have to keep their plans to themselves if they are to carry out the act. Thus, the people most in need of help may be the toughest to save.”
Suicide is the tenth leading cause of death overall, and although there is a population of suicidal candidates who have identifiable mental illnesses, such as depression, schizophrenia, or addiction, many show no signs at all. According to Harvard Medical School, suicides can be spurred by episodes of depression, psychosis, anxiety, a loss such as a death, job, or marriage, increased sense of isolation, loss of social support, such as a friend who moves away, illness or medication, or even being surrounded by suicidal behaviors of friends, peers, or celebrities.
The suicide rate has risen more than two percent — that’s the highest since 1987 when the rate was 12.8 people per 100,000. Out of today’s 100,000 Americans, 12.6 will take their own lives for a reason many times unbeknownst to the rest of the surviving world. Life is arguably meant to be lived for more than just dodging bullets of cancer, diabetes, schizophrenia, and overwhelming bouts of abandonment that may feel unsurmountable at times. We must push forth with a sense of durability no matter how weak our physical bodies become or how crippling our mental and emotion states drag us down to.
The answers to our depressive state may be completely inconclusive and speculator, but it could be attributed to the unilateral exchange of expressions across the globe through social media. It has, and inevitable as death itself, taken the world swiftly. Its omnipresence in our everyday lives could be a recipe for disaster, and we’ll never really know the answer until researchers analyze different possibilities. It could be the five percent increase of stress coupled with five percent decrease in happiness Americans today report to Gallup surveys, but anything would been an educated guess at this point.
While it’s reassuring that a child born in America today will live longer than being born at any other time in human history, according to CDC’s report, it’s immensely discouraging that people are increasingly slipping through the cracks of life by their own accord. Technology, medical innovations, and intensive research and funding has been able to lower eight out of the 10 leading causes of death in America, including lower death rates of heart disease, cancer, chronic lower respiratory diseases, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, influenza, and kidney diseases. We can thank our longer life spans to the incremental decreases of each disease between 2011 and 2012, and hopefully we'll live to see more improvements over the next bracket of time.
“Much of the recent improvement in death rates and life expectancy for population groups examined can be attributed to reductions in death rates from major causes of death, such as heart disease, cancer, stroke, and chronic lower respiratory diseases,” the CDC said.