Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

The annual suicide rate in England was 13 per 100,000 in 1863; it hit peaks of around 19 in the first decade of the 20th century and more than 20 during the Great Depression, plunged during World War II and again in the 1960s, and then fell more gradually to 7.4 in 2007. Switzerland, too, saw a decline of more than twofold, from 24 in 1881 and 27 during the Depression to 12.2 in 2013. The United States suicide rate peaked at around 17 in the early 20th century and again during the Depression before falling to 10.5 at the turn of the millennium, followed by a rise after the recent Great Recession to 13.

Figure 18-3: Suicide, England, Switzerland, and US, 1860–2014

Sources: England (including Wales): Thomas & Gunnell 2010, fig. 1, average of male and female rates, provided by Kylie Thomas. The series has not been extended because the data are not commensurable with current records. Switzerland, 1880–1959: Ajdacic-Gross et al. 2006, fig. 1. Switzerland, 1960–2013: WHO Mortality Database, OECD 2015b. United States, 1900–1998: Centers for Disease Control, Carter et al. 2000, table Ab950. United States, 1999–2014: Centers for Disease Control 2015.

So in all three countries for which we have historical data, suicide was more common in the past than it is today. The visible crests and troughs are the surface of a churning sea of ages, cohorts, periods, and sexes.⁵⁷ Suicide rates rise sharply during adolescence and then more gently into middle age, where they peak for females (perhaps because they face menopause and an empty nest) and then fall back down, while staying put for males before shooting up in their retirement years (perhaps because they face an end to their traditional role as providers). Part of the recent increase in the American suicide rate can be attributed to the aging of the population, with the large cohort of Boomer males moving into their most suicide-prone years. But the cohorts themselves matter as well. The GI and Silent generations were more reluctant to kill themselves than the Victorian cohorts that preceded them and the Boomers and Gen-Xers that followed them. The Millennials appear to be slowing or reversing the generational rise; adolescent suicide rates fell between the early 1990s and the first decades of the 21st century.⁵⁸ The times themselves (adjusting for ages and cohorts) have become less conducive to suicide since the peaks around the turn of the 20th century, the 1930s, and the late 1960s to early 1970s; they dropped to a forty-year low in 1999, though we have seen a slight rise again since the Great Recession. This complexity belies the alarmism of the recent New York Times headline “U.S. Suicide Rate Surges to a 30-Year High,” which could also have been titled “Despite the Recession and an Aging Population, U.S. Suicide Rate Is a Third Lower Than Previous Peaks.”⁵⁹

Together with the belief that modernity makes people want to kill themselves, the other great myth about suicide is that Sweden, that paragon of Enlightenment humanism, has the world’s highest suicide rate. This urban legend originated (according to what might be another urban legend) in a speech by Dwight Eisenhower in 1960 in which he called out Sweden’s high suicide rate and blamed it on the country’s paternalistic socialism.⁶⁰ I myself would have blamed the bleak existential films of Ingmar Bergman, but both theories are explanations in search of a fact to explain. Though Sweden’s suicide rate in 1960 was higher than that of the United States (15.2 versus 10.8 per 100,000), it was never the world’s highest, and it has since fallen to 11.1, which is below the world average (11.6) and the rate for the United States (12.1) and in fifty-eighth place overall.⁶¹ A recent review of suicide rates across the world noted that “generally the suicide trend has been downward in Europe and there are currently no Western European welfare states in the world top ten for suicide rates.”⁶²

Everyone occasionally suffers from depression, and some people are stricken with major depression, in which the sadness and hopelessness last more than two weeks and interfere with carrying on with life. In recent decades, more people have been diagnosed with depression, especially in younger cohorts, and the conventional wisdom is captured in the tag line of a recent public television documentary: “A silent epidemic is ravaging the nation and killing our kids.” We have just seen that the nation is not suffering from an epidemic of unhappiness, loneliness, or suicide, so an epidemic of depression seems unlikely, and it turns out to be an illusion.