Old white guys, and I mean really old — 85 and older — are a lucky bunch. They’ve beaten the odds in terms of longevity. They’ve also arrived at this once-distant point in their lives in better health and with better access to medical care than most black or Hispanic men in the same age group. They’re financially better off than women, generally, in their mid-80s and beyond, too.
So I was shocked to hear in a recent discussion with Dr. Carl Clark, president and CEO of the Mental Health Center of Denver, that white males over 85 in the U.S., a cohort to which I aspire to join someday, have an astonishingly high suicide rate. It’s 51 out of 10,000, or about one in every 200. This group kills themselves at the highest rate of any demographic in America.
Curiously, it’s not really old age itself that’s creating this problem. If you strip out gender and race, this age cohort has a suicide rate of 1.8 per 10,000, just behind the 1.9 per 10,000 suicide rate for Americans between the ages of 45 and 64. Pulling up my calculator app, it seems that simply being white and male boost the suicide rate among those 85 and older by a factor of 28. For a demographic that, as a group, has historically had it pretty good, this is a sad end-of-life twist.
The actual numbers of suicides for those 85 and older — an age group I will unscientifically call the “old-old” — were 2,514 suicides in 2010, the most recent year for which reliable statistics exist. Put another way, it means that about every three hours a white male over 85 commits suicide.
Clark says that number is fairly stable across generations and geographies. Extrapolate that data out for an aging population over the next decades, and you have a very dire prediction.
The total number would increase by almost 92% to 4,825 old white male suicides by the year 2050. For context, that will be the generation born in and around 1970.
Those guys aren’t going out quietly with a bottle of pills, either. No, the gun is the leading method for elderly male suicide. White men over 85 are also unusually good at committing suicide. The elderly have a 4-to-1 suicide success rate, at the opposite end of the spectrum from the 25:1 ratio for young people.
Theories abound for the prevalence of suicide in the “old-old” age group. Major depressive disorder and other mental health issues are thought to be at least partly to blame in as many as 90% of the deaths. The loss of loved ones, isolation, hopelessness and persistent or serious physical illness often trigger the disease, which may have been lying in wait for them on some level, untreated, for a lifetime.
Clark suspects, and it sounds feasible to me, that most of those men who kill themselves have likely been struggling with untreated depression their entire lives. After all, estimates are that one in five people suffer with a mental illness, and only 50% get treatment. And depression is one of the more undertreated mental illnesses. It can sap people’s energy to seek treatment.
It would be a wise investment to tackle this problem, given the health-care-expense crisis in this country. Depressed people have a higher cost of health care across the board. Their lifetime health-care costs are some three to five times higher than the rest of the population. Taking care of oneself, exercising, eating well and following through with self-care and check-ups are all challenges for anyone with even moderate depression.
New counseling methodologies and medications may mitigate the trend of late-in-life suicides, as might the lessening stigma of depression and better education. Faster interventions and treatment, as well as using advanced technology and health-care apps for low-dose counseling, which could make mental health care more affordable and accessible for many elderly, also could play a role.
Still, it stuns me to know that, in the three hours I spent writing this article, somewhere in America an old man, an old white man, probably one who many would presume has led a long and fruitful existence, the kind of man one sees in retirement homes and Memorial Day parades, or on park benches and at the grocery store, perhaps with a walker, or perhaps a man like your grandfather or your father or your older brother or an uncle, or perhaps just someone you know, has taken his own life.
Andrew Schroepfer is chief strategy officer at Hosting, a Denver-based managed-cloud services firm. This is the first in a series of “100Candles” articles, or musings, on what it means as our population ages, and more of us reach 100 years old. Follow him on Twitter at @SHrepFUR, which is the phonetic spelling of his name, and Hosting at @HOSTINGdotcom.
For old white men, a sad — and shocking — statistic
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