It is a tragedy. It is happening. And we don't know why.

From The Curious Case of America’s Suicide Crisis by Charles Fain Lehman.

A useful summary of a woefully under-reported topic. It is easy to get outraged. And I do. We lose 70,000 people a year to overdoses and 50,000 people a year to suicide. Why? How can we live in the safest, most prosperous, most connected, most privileged era ever. And yet this is happening.

The outrage, though, has to be tempered by humility. Like most fundamental things such as criminal violence, economic cycles, life outcomes, etc., we have much data and little understanding. We simply don't what is driving what nor whether there are interventions that can make a practical difference.

These figures are a tragedy. But they are also a mystery. Experts have been unable to pick apart a statistical story that grows stranger the closer you look. What, they have been asking for years, is behind this unrelenting increase?

"We don't have a good answer," Dr. Jonathan Singer, president of the American Association of Suicidology (AAS), said. "That's the most accurate answer."

Other experts are equally perplexed—as one put it, "I have my guesses, other people have their guesses," but guesswork remains guesswork. Suicide has risen through booms and busts, across age groups, and simultaneously with Americans' increasing self-reported happiness. Explanations proffered by popular commentators and politicians raise more questions than they answer.

Of the crises of self-inflicted death that have struck Americans in recent years—including drugs and alcohol—the suicide spike is by far the hardest to explain. At the same time, it has received the least attention: While the federal government earmarks millions of dollars for alcohol abuse and billions for drugs, suicide receives little in the way of funding. A lack of research, as well as limited resources for interventions, promise to continue to make this case deadlier every year.

[snip]

"Anyone who tells you that they know exactly why the rates are going up or going down is lying to you," Andrews said. "We truly don't understand this really well."

"I wish I could give you a better soundbite with this," Singer said. "It's just so complicated, and we don't know."

A two-decade suicide spike has given commentators and scientists time to formulate hypotheses. But the holes in their arguments actually make the crisis appear even more mysterious.

For example, Singer explained, for "a long time," suicidologists believed that youth suicide corresponded with other risky teenage behaviors—drinking, having sex, doing drugs, etc. But as such behaviors have become less common, teen suicide has only risen—in other words, less risk now means more suicide, not less.

Andrews suggested that the spike has something to do with both cultural and economic changes. But the latter explanation highlights something equally weird: The suicide rate seems largely unrelated to the business cycle, growing just as quickly before, during, and after the Great Recession.

Other curiosities emerge when one more closely examines less-scholarly explanations. Start with one often invoked by those on the left: the 400 million firearms in American homes. Guns were at the center of a feature on the crisis in Rolling Stone last May, while in October, Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D., N.Y.) released a report claiming to find that "gun access is driving [the] suicide epidemic."

Maloney, Rolling Stone, and others correctly identify that firearms are the leading cause of suicide death, but that has been true for decades. Surprisingly, firearm deaths do not account for the major part of the increase in suicides since 1999.

Read the whole thing.

It is a useful tonic against the arrogance of assumed knowledge.