Why Live

What causes suicide epidemics—and how can we prevent them?

Many suicides are caused by biological mental illness, but sometimes the suicide rate of a particular group jumps—two, three or even ten-fold—in a short time, so that it behaves like an epidemic. Suicide epidemics unfold more slowly than microbial plagues like flu or malaria, but they happen far too quickly to result from genetic changes, and affect far too many people to be explained away as spontaneous cases of brain injury.

Suicide epidemics have occurred in America’s rustbelt towns, Russia’s cities, and indigenous communities from the Arctic to the Islands of the Pacific. They tend not to be associated with wars, poverty or environmental disasters, but with a rupture in the social environment so profound that people come to question their most intimate attachments. The mental pain that drives suicide has been likened to the flipside of love, but if so, how does love suddenly disappear—or seem to—from the lives of thousands of people? In Why Live, public health researcher Helen C. Epstein sets out to find the answer.