Suicide Rates, and Another Plea for Equity

People are so thrilled with how things are going in this country that they are killing themselves as fast as they can, being literally driven crazy by the absurdly bad policies forced upon them.  The CDC released its latest data on the topic, nearly complete for 2022.  Note that suicides are generally undercounted due to sensitivity of relatives, with for example, intentional drug overdoses often being categorized as an accident.  Despite this, we see that the number and rate of suicides continues a long-term increase, despite supposed intensive government efforts on prevention programs.  (CDC Report)

My bigger concern, however, as a new convert to concerns about equity in particular, is the vast disparity in rates across races.  Native Americans have by far the highest rates, but white (am I supposed to capitalize that, or are we still pretending that white people are second-class citizens who don’t deserve to have their race capitalized?) people have the second highest at 28.2 per 100,000.  Black people are only at a 14.8 rate, Hispanics at a 13.1 and Asians at a 10.3 rate.  So white people commit suicide at a rate twice that of Blacks or Hispanics.  But I don’t see any of this reported breathlessly as a national crisis and a disparity that must be reduced.

I demand that it be reduced.  Either get Blacks and Hispanics to kill themselves more (which the current government would be much better at doing) or actually recognize that there is a big problem with white suicides and spend some serious money to address it.  The yammering on and on about equity has no credibility when it is routinely ignored as applied to whites or Asians or really any group but Blacks.