Yesterday the New York Times published an op-ed about suicide among young people in the United States. As the author writes, citing Center for Disease Control (CDC) data, “After declining for nearly two decades, the suicide rate among Americans aged 10 to 24 jumped 56 percent between 2007 and 2017.” He notes that while suicide remains more common among men, the rate has been increasing quickest among young women, rising 12.7 percent each year as compared with 7.1 percent for young men.

A further look at the CDC data underlines the trend. As Sally C. Curtin and Melonie Heron note in a National Center for Health Statistics brief for the CDC, not only did the suicide rate go from remaining stable among ten- to twenty-four-year-olds between 2000 and 2007 to jumping 56 percent over the following decade, “the pace of increase for suicide was greater from 2013 to 2017 (7 percent annually, on average) than from 2007 to 2013 (3 percent annually).”

In other words, the suicide rate is accelerating — it may well have been even higher in 2018 and 2019.

We tend to think of suicide as the result of individual afflictions, but they’re also social phenomena. These new numbers reminded me of the recent data on young people not having as many children as they’d like to. If the decision to have or to not have children is a family’s own choice, such choices have social roots, too.

It’s fine not to have kids, of course, but young people reporting doing so because of crushing debt, impossibly expensive childcare, immiserating jobs, or inadequate health care should set off alarm bells. That last one, our crumbling, evil, labyrinthine health care system, is a major part of the story of youth suicide (So is household gun ownership, though the New York Times curiously didn’t mention this.)

In the context of a spike in suicide rates in the UK, the late Mark Fisher once argued — against those who deny suicide’s political causes — that “for many of those suffering from mental illnesses, the capacity to act rationally is impaired, which is one reason that they need to be protected. Without a safety net to catch you, the consequences of falling increase exponentially.

The gutting of welfare programs can’t be mechanically mapped onto every suicide: I’ve known suicides caused by privation, but I’ve also known seemingly blessed inhabitants of charmed lives who killed themselves. When I contemplated suicide, my life had never been better. (I’d have been in the as-yet-unreleased 2019 statistics.)

But socioeconomic conditions are the water in which people swim, and figures like these are ominous warnings about the rising temperature. After all, “deaths of despair” — not just suicide, but overdoses too — are on the rise to such an extent that they’ve caused a decline in US life expectancy.

As for solutions? For starters, a study published this week in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health finds that a $1 increase in the minimum wage equates to a 3.4 percent to 5.9 percent decrease in suicide rates for those aged eighteen to sixty-four with a high school education or less, with effects appearing “greatest during periods of high unemployment.” We have to connect suicide rates to a punishing health care system and stagnant wages; improving wages, working conditions, and winning universal health care — including mental health care for all — will go a long way. Fisher closed his column on suicides, five years before he killed himself, with the right idea: “We need to reverse the privatization of stress.”