America’s Epidemic of Loneliness Part 3: Suicide and Friendship

Warning: this post discusses suicide. If you have suicidal thoughts, there is a national number in the US you can call – 988 – to connect to someone who may be able to help.

I was on a small email list with my friend Doug, and the posts from him were getting stranger and stranger. He was writing about strange arguments with local officials, sharing unusual worries about usual problems, making increasingly unsupported leaps of logic. I responded to a few of them dismissively or sarcastically. Then, as they increased in frequency and oddness, I stopped responding at all.

Doug was my long-time tennis doubles partner. We’d stayed in shitty hotels together, eaten all sorts of exotic food together, suffered through ridiculously long, hot matches together, concocted elaborate prematch strategies to defeat teams that were faster or more talented. At his 50th birthday party, I wrote him 50 haikus celebrating his quirkiness. And even though he was notoriously frugal, when my wife went on bedrest during pregnancy, Doug and his wife sprung for regular massages for her. It was one of the most generous gifts I’ve ever received.

*Doubles partners, friends (Doug on the left)*

Over the previous five years, we’d spent less time together. He moved further away. We both got busy. By the time the emails started coming, it had been a few months since we’d seen each other.

Then the emails stopped. Six weeks later, he killed himself with a handgun.

According to the American Community Survey (ACS), friendship is in deep trouble in the US. The percentage of people reporting having no close friends – zero – has increased from 3% in 1990 to 12% in 2021. One out of every seven men – 15% of us – report having no close friends. The number of close friends is declining at every level: in 1990 55% of men reported having 6 or more friends; by 2021 that number had declined to 27%. Our time for friendship is being crowded out, experts say, as we work longer hours at our jobs, spend more time with our kids and increase our time online alone. The pandemic played a role – about half of people reported it made maintaining friendships more difficult.

The ACS doesn’t give people a specific definition of what a “close” friend is. One definition, from the American National Social Network, is that a close friend is a person (not including immediate family) that you’ve “talked to in the past six months about an important personal matter.” According to their surveys, 17% of us have no close friends.

What’s going on and what can we do about it? A new article from Ian Marcus Corbin in National Affairs, “The Loneliest Crowd,” takes an intense look at the nature and value of friendship.

True friends, Corbin says, don’t just hang out together in the same space, they profoundly and fundamentally shape each other.

Without thinking about it, when we see a close friend trying a career move, starting a new relationship, or testing out an ethical boundary, we learn something about ourselves, and they depend on our feedback to sort through whether it makes sense. Close friends create their worldviews in dialogue with each other, and that is better for both of them. As Corbin puts it: “I have more of myself available to me when I have friends around: Your mind joins with mine, and I experience myself as larger in your presence.”

This does not mean that we serve as each other’s echo chambers. True friends can both call their friends back to some common core of ethics that they share and be open to the new ideas their friends are testing out. Friends “suss out blind spots and gaps in our view of the world,” says Corbin, “welcoming in new realities and allowing our worlds to remain living, growing things.”

How did I react to Doug’s emails? As I watched him spiral over a couple of months, I rationalized doing nothing. He had always enjoyed poking – “he’s just saying that to annoy me, to get an outraged reaction from me,” I would say to myself. Plus I was really BUSY, I told myself, doing IMPORTANT work, don’t you know. Sooner or later, I thought, he’d come around and we’d be able to have a normal conversation again. So instead of pushing back or reaching out I turned my back.

I’m not taking on all responsibility for Doug’s death. Suicide rates have been increasing for the past two decades, and every act is a result of a complex set of circumstances. There are a number of actions that seem to reduce the number of suicides:

· Tougher gun laws seem to make a difference. Half of suicide deaths come from guns (and gun suicide attempts are “successful” 85% of the time, compared to 3% of attempts from pills). The states with the toughest laws (New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts) have the lowest suicide rates and the ones with the loosest laws (Montana, Alaska, Wyoming) have the highest rates. Suicide rates in Wyoming are four times higher than in New Jersey.

· Living in an urban area seems to help. Suicide rates are twice as high in rural settings. Experts think it may help to be closer to neighbors, or have easier access to mental health treatment facilities.

· Paying special attention to males of all ages (four times more likely than women to commit suicide), teenage girls (one in three have seriously considered suicide), Native Americans, members of the LGBTQ community, veterans and very old adults may make a difference. All of these groups commit suicide at higher-than-average rates.

· Fundamental changes to social media could make a difference. There’s been a straightline increase in depression among teenagers since the introduction of the smartphone in the early 2010’s. What would happen if even a few of the tech geniuses turned their brains to prosocial algorithms?

· Simple intervention programs can help after a first suicide attempt. A program in Switzerland involving brief counseling sessions and ongoing “caring emails” from professionals reduced followup suicide attempts by 2/3.

But most of us are not in a position to make deep public policy adjustments or fund programs.

What we can do something about is making sure our friends aren’t spiraling into loneliness and isolation. We can show up for them when they reach out, or notice when they don’t. We can call them up when we see they’re headed down a strange road. We can do what I didn’t do for Doug: we can be a friend. Is there someone you need to reach out to today?

-Leslie

References:

Corbin’s article: https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-loneliest-crowd

American friendship survey: https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/the-state-of-american-friendship-change-challenges-and-loss/

Aristotle on friendship: https://theconversation.com/three-lessons-from-aristotle-on-friendship-200520

Gun suicide mortality rates: https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-publhealth-031811-124636?journalCode=publhealth

Teen depression and suicidal ideation: https://nypost.com/2023/06/19/number-of-teens-who-dont-enjoy-life-has-doubled-with-social-media/

State by state suicide rates: https://www.americashealthrankings.org/explore/measures/suicide

Influencers of suicide rates: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2019-12-11/among-us-states-new-yorks-suicide-rate-is-the-lowest-hows-that

Increasing rates of suicide: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db330-h.pdf

A song Doug probably wouldn’t have liked, but has meant a lot to me since he died: “Some Other Time” by Tony Bennett and Bill Evans: https://open.spotify.com/track/72AaXV7AS5vTlaKCL153Ne?si=INrzby_6TsOWjBjvvb7eDg&context=spotify%3Asearch%3Asome%2Bother%2B