What I suspect this means is that quite a few middle-aged white Americans who found themselves out of a job and impoverished due to the 2008 crash and the subsequent never-ending recession we are in are committing suicide because they feel like failures. The older you are the harder it is to start over. You just don’t have the same good health and energy you had when you were young. White folks are more inclined to internalize problems and blame themselves than people of other races and ethnicities. You don’t hear of black folks killing themselves because they are poor and on welfare, but in counties where big factories closed up for good the number of white folks killing themselves increased.

It appears Oprah is getting her wish ... with one difference: The white people who "just have to die" are not old folks, but middle-aged Americans.
The New York Times cited a study that concludes white Americans are dying from suicides.
“Wow,” said Samuel Preston, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on mortality trends and the health of populations, who was not involved in the research. “This is a vivid indication that something is awry in these American households.”
Dr. Deaton had but one parallel. “Only H.I.V./AIDS in contemporary times has done anything like this,” he said.
In contrast, the death rate for middle-aged blacks and Hispanics continued to decline during the same period, as did death rates for younger and older people of all races and ethnic groups.
Middle-aged blacks still have a higher mortality rate than whites — 581 per 100,000, compared with 415 for whites — but the gap is closing, and the rate for middle-aged Hispanics is far lower than for middle-aged whites at 262 per 100,000.
David M. Cutler, a Harvard health care economist, said that although it was known that people were dying from causes like opioid addiction, the thought was that those deaths were just blips in the health care statistics and that over all everyone’s health was improving. The new paper, he said, “shows those blips are more like incoming missiles.”
Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case (who are husband and wife) say they stumbled on their finding by accident, looking at a variety of national data sets on mortality rates and federal surveys that asked people about their levels of pain, disability and general ill health.
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