Learning you can take a punch

Using statistics from the Census Bureau and the National Center for Health Statistics, sociologist Ellen Idler of Emory University has discovered that “baby boomers� — born between 1945 and 1964 — are committing suicide at a rate significantly higher than people younger or older, and have been doing so for about a decade.

How much higher? A rate of 17.7 deaths per 100,000, as compared to 13.0 for younger people and 12.6 for older people. The middle-aged suicide rate for this particular generation is worrying because people aged 40 to 59 have historically had low suicide rates. Also troublesome is that the baby boomers have had higher suicide rates than the norm throughout their lives — double the previous norm when they were adolescents.

Trying to explain the high rate, Idler cites statistics about proximity: People who commit suicide have friends or relatives who have done so. She reasons that the many adolescent suicides among the baby boomers affected survivor boomers’ willingness to commit suicide later.

Her other explanation — more a guess than a statistical inference — is that because this generation was the first to be very well protected from childhood diseases, when in middle age they began to have chronic illnesses, they despaired and sought to die.

 I think the problem is broader than encountering illness for the first time. More likely the boomers are committing suicide at a higher rate because they as a generation have not really found out whether they can take a punch — an illness punch, a death in the family punch, a catastrophic job loss punch.

 While in World War II, around 400,000 Americans died in combat or in combat-related deaths, out of a population of 140 million; in Vietnam, the baby boomers’ war, the number of combat and combat-related deaths was around 60,000, out of a population of 200 million, a much lower ratio of hurt per family.

Of course each family that suffered such a loss was severely damaged, but the pain was not spread around as broadly as in World War II.

Similarly, during the Depression, unemployment rates remained above 25 percent for six years; the worst unemployment rate seen by the baby boomers was half that high.

Again, when one loses a job, that is unquestionably a trauma for the individual, but looked at in historical perspective, the pain of unemployment has been spread more thinly in recent decades than in the 1930s.

In the course of research for my book, “The Day America Crashed,� I corresponded with hundreds of people who had tales to tell about the stock market crash of 1929. Many worried that when their generation was gone, the United States would be run by successors who equated freedom with wealth and viewed both as rights, not privileges.

The school of hard knocks had taught the elders that not everything in life goes right all the time, and they felt that the generation born after the war, because it had not known hardship intimately, might be cavalier about their money.

I should point out that even in the 1930s, the suicide rate for the United States was no higher than in the 1920s. The notion that during the Depression lots of people committed suicide is a myth begun by, of all people, Winston Churchill.

He happened to be in New York one late October day in 1929 when the stock markets were crashing, and a man jumped out of a window and landed not far from him; he wrote up the incident in a magazine, and a myth was born.

A lack of difficulties to be overcome has been a significant factor of the lives of many baby boomers, and may be an important contributor to their high suicide rates, which are expected to continue into their old age, in contrast to the usual pattern.

“Most people never learn whether they can take a punch, but I found out,� said a baby boomer friend who had simultaneously been through a betrayal by his law partner, a divorce and an automobile accident, and come back stronger than ever.

Chat long enough with your neighbor, friend, or relative and you’ll hear similar stories about their hardships, and also, that they have not wallowed in those trenches but have somehow managed to get past life’s vicissitudes. They have learned that they can take a punch, and are the stronger for it.

Knowing that we have the ability to survive even terrible things happening in our lives may be the most important lesson any of us can inculcate, and it is one that can counter the despair that leads to suicide.

Salisbury resident Tom Shachtman has written more than two dozen books and many television documentaries.