Baby Boomer Suicide

Interesting article by Tara Bahrampour in the Post about the high suicide rate among baby boomers. They have always had a higher suicide rate than previous generations, and as they age into the stage of life when suicide is most common, experts on these things worry that their suicide rate will soar.

The theme of Bahrampour's essay is that the generation's problem is the collapse of high expectations. For some it was the expectation that the counter culture would really change things:

Last spring, Frank Turkaly tried to kill himself. A retiree in a Pittsburgh suburb living on disability checks, he was estranged from friends and family, mired in credit card debt and taking medication for depression, cholesterol, diabetes and high blood pressure. It was not the life he had envisioned as a young man in the 1960s and ’70s, when “people were more in tune with each other, people were more prone to help each other,” said Turkaly, 63, who owned a camera shop and later worked at Sears. “There was not this big segregation between the poor and the rich. . . . I thought it was going to continue the same, I didn’t think it was going to change.”

This deep sadness over the failure of the 60s to change our society in fundamental ways seems to me to be common, at least, I personally know three or four people whose outlooks on life and politics are still overshadowed by the loss of that youthful promise.

For others the loss has been a sense of empowerment and possibility. Bob Knight, USC psychologist:

There was an illusion of choice — where people thought they’d be able to re-create themselves again and again. These people feel a greater sense of disappointment because their expectations of leading glorious lives didn’t come to fruition.

Instead, as Bahrampour puts it,

compared with their parents’ generation, boomers have higher rates of obesity, prescription and illicit drug abuse, alcoholism, divorce, depression and mental disorders. 

This leads to a second point, which is that many aging baby boomers find themselves alone. What sustains people through the hard parts of life is mainly connections to other people. In pursuit of self actualization, many baby boomers did not develop those ties. The surge in divorce is one key part of this; another is the "bowling alone" phenomenon, the decline of social groups from the Masons to the Junior League. Baby boomers are much less likely than previous generations to feel that they are part of a strong community.

Some of Bahrampour's sources are a little scornful of baby boomers, implying that because they had such easy young lives they are not now tough enough to handle the pains of aging. I think that is wrong; one thing we know about this generation is that all of its problems are worse among those who served in Vietnam than among those who did not. It is also wrong to blame geographical mobility, since Baby Boomers were no more likely to move to another state than nineteenth-century Americans. Barhampour also does not deal with the fading of religion in this generation, and thus of the strong religious taboo against suicide.

But I was moved to write this from a strong sense that her argument about high expectations has something to it. I think it is dangerous to put too much stress on the possibilities of the future, without enough of a foundation in the strengths of the past. Family, community, faith, and skilled work were not the insidious creations of reactionary patriarchs, and in all likelihood the future is not going to be a self-actualized paradise. Instead of hippies these days we have techno- libertarians, but they are making the same mistake that many baby-boomers did. Self-empowerment, the breaking of the bonds that held past generations down, can all too easily lead only to futile loneliness.