1,750,000 ‘deaths of despair’
Economist Toby Rogers shows that this number…doesn’t include the ~4,000 imprisonments from every 1% unemployment increase, and ~3,000 of mental health hospitalizations and other from every 1%.
Follow up article by Jeffrey Jaxen, investigative reporter for The Highwire.
Deaths from drug or alcohol overdose – (part of ‘deaths from despair’)
More than 81,230 people died from a drug overdose between June 1, 2019, and May 31, 2020, the CDC provisional data shows, which is up 18% over the same period the year prior, however the final number is expected to be higher. “This represents a worsening of the drug overdose epidemic in the United States and is the largest number of drug overdoses for a 12-month period ever recorded,” the CDC stated.
Mental health experts have been warning officials for months about the effects that lockdowns have on drug use and suicide rates. During a May 19 Cabinet meeting in the White House, Dr. Elinore McCance-Katz implored officials to consider the impact.
“To put all of this in perspective, I believe it is important to point out that, pre-pandemic, we lose 120,000 lives a year to drug overdose and suicide. How many more lives are we willing to sacrifice in the name of containing the virus?” said McCance-Katz, assistant secretary for mental health and substance abuse at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). She’s also a psychiatrist and holds a doctorate in infectious disease epidemiology. …As a psychiatrist, I would argue that a life lost to suicide is just as important as a life lost to coronavirus,” McCance-Katz said. “I ask that you take into account whole health, not just one narrow aspect of physical health.”