Drugs, alcohol and suicide: Mortality rates continue to rise in the U.S

U.S. life expectancy fell for the second year in a row, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — And a VCU professor says drugs, alcohol and suicide are to blame.

In his editorial, “Failing Health of the United States,” Steven Woolf, director of the Center on Society and Health addressed the challenges Americans face that contribute to the life expectancy decrease by a tenth of a year from 2015 to 2016.

People born in 2017 are expected to live 78.6 years, which means 400,000 years of life will be lost due to the decrease — more than the years of life lost during the Iraq War — according to Bill Gardner, a professor at the University of Ottawa.

“Drug overdoses in particular account for a large increase in death rates in the United States, but the other reason for mentioning these three together is that they fit into a larger pattern of what we call stress-related conditions,” Woolf said.

Stress-related conditions refer to harmful behaviors that are often used as coping mechanisms  for a strained living environment. A 2013 study by the National Research Council and Institute of Medicine found the United States is not as healthy as other countries because of social and environmental factors.

Since the late 1990s, U.S life expectancy has been below the average of other high-income countries.

“Americans are more likely to have unhealthy behaviors such as high caloric intake and civilian ownership of firearms, risker driving practices that might explain the higher death rate from car crashes,” Woolf said. “But it wasn’t just individual behaviors.”

The study found the U.S has higher disease rates for a wide variety of conditions and it identified many single factors that may contribute — specifically socio-economic conditions, like education, income, poverty rates, income inequality as an important factor.

This supports the specific drop among middle-aged White Americans and people living in rural communities.

“We found the counties in the U.S where this seems to be happening are counties with economic challenges that have had stagnant wages, high poverty rates (and) unemployment for many years now,” Woolf said.

Americans on average have higher poverty rates, child poverty rates and income inequality. The latter is especially important in understanding this recent upsurge, Woolf said, because of a tendency in society to blame individuals for their problems. People may find themselves stuck in an environment society created.

“So we have a tendency in our society to go directly to the symptoms of the problem and try to treat those rather than the upstream,” Woolf said. “We have to sort of step back and think about the policies and conditions in communities that are driving people to these behaviors.”

The problem can be addressed through policies that invest in the middle class and improve access to education, jobs, housing and transportation, Woolf said.

“Governors and legislators are making decisions about public policies that have a big impact on the middle class,” Woolf said. “The chances of people fulfilling the American dream are now lowest for Americans, so I think we probably need to take action soon or it’s probably going to continue.”

SaraRose Martin, News Editor