One Weird Trick To Lower The Suicide Rate

A state by state breakdown of minimum wages.  A new study
links raising that rage to lowering the suicide rate.

Suicide is a national tragedy.

One way to prevent suicide, it turns out, is to raise the minimum wage.

That idea makes sense. The national minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, and you really can't survive on that.


Yes, many states, including here in Vermont, have a minimum wage higher than that. Plus, not many people actually make that $7.25 minimum wage. Most people, thank goodness, make more.

But even if you're making more than $7.25 an hour, I can see how hopeless you can get mired in poverty while working your ass off.  

A recently published study adds credence to this idea that a higher wage would decrease hopelessness, and by extension, suicide.

According to NPR:

"Between 1990 and 2015, raising the minimum wage by $1 in each state might have saved more than 27,000 lives, according to a report published this week in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. An increase in $2 in each state's minimum wage could have prevented more than 57,000 suicides."

According to the NPR report, the suicide rate goes down more if governments raise the minimum wage when it's harder to find a job.  The suicide rate declines more with higher wages during recessions instead of booms.

Of course, my logic above stated that maybe higher minimum wages reduce hopelessness. However, that's yet to be proven.

The study looked at state-wide data and not individuals, so it was impossible to determine exactly why a higher minimum wage correlates with lower suicide rates.

Clearly, more work needs to be done to understand what's going on behind the study.  John Kaufman, the lead author of the study and an epidmiology doctoral student at Emory University, told NPR he wants to look into whether a higher minimum wage could lessen depression, an obvious risk factor for suicide.

One thing I'm encouraged by is that a lot of other scientists have taken an interest in how economic well being, or lack thereof, affects the actual well-being of people in general.

There's been a drive in recent decades, in my opinion, and many others, toward a dystopian society in which a certain few have gained more and more money and power and control over every aspect of the rest of us. Pretty much always to our detriment.  

Take the United States health care system. (Please!) It's really not designed to help most of us. We pay an arm and a leg for health insurance. The insurers throw us a bone now and then when we're relatively young and healthy to cover many of our expenses when relatively minor health issues or injuries crop up.

Then, at some point, you come down with a complicated, expensive illness. The health care system seizes all of your assets when you are in this vulnerable, ill position. That pays for the costs of your illness.

Finally, when the 1% has seized all of your assets, they kill you off by basically cutting off treatment. Or, at least they put you in such poverty that you've lost your will to live.

It's legal murder.

That's just one example of how dystopian it's gotten. And how hopeless most of us become, or would  become, if trapped in poverty with no way out. It's why a lot of politicians, mostly GOP, and the very rich, don't like increases in minimum wages. It's a way to keep people down, fearful and powerless.

I imagine these studies displease the 1% Powers That Be, but so what?  Scientific facts aren't always conservatives and the 1%'s strong suit, but we might as well fight back with science, right?

NPR says the study cited above is the third in less than a year to show raising the minimum wage could lower suicide rates. That comes from Dr. Alexander Tsai an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard's Massachusetts General Hospital.

Tsai told NPR that there has been a surge of interest about the link between health and minimum wage. There's been about 30 studies linking the raises to better health, and most were published in the past five years or so.

Of course, the Conservative American Enterprise Institute sounds skeptical of all this, but at least the economist from that organizationk Aparna Marthur, was reasonable enough when she spoke with NPR. (I've kind of gotten used to conservatives going into a panic when someone proposes something like raising the minimum wage, so the fact that Marthur sounds like an adult was a relief.)

She said on the face of it, the suicide/minimum wage study makes sense. She does note that raising the minimum wage would make an employer cut someone's job or decide not to hire new staff.

This is for another day, but I would like to see studies that help us understand the link between minimum wage hikes and job creation, if there is any.

But anyway, for the pro-lifers out there: If you want to save a life, maybe raising the minimum wage is one way to do it.