Helen C. Epstein

Why Live (eBook, ePUB)

An Anatomy of Suicide Epidemics

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

A search for the meaning behind suicide epidemics

When the suicide rate of a particular group jumps by as much as fourfold or more in a short time, they are categorized as suicide epidemics. Suicides aren't more common where people are poorer, in wars, or have recently experienced environmental disasters; nor were they higher during the COVID-19 pandemic. On the other hand, the suicide rate tripled among middle-aged Russians after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and quintupled in white middle-aged working-class Americans in the 1970s. What is causing suicide epidemics?

In Why Live, public health researcher Helen C. Epstein travels to the remote Canadian territory of Nanavut, the region with the highest suicide rate in the world; a post-USSR Russia, where people struggle to adapt to a more capitalist society; and Micronesia, home to one of the most dramatic and sustained suicide epidemics ever identified. Consistently, she finds a sudden loss of social cohesion to be the instigating factor. When a culture based on mutual aid and community gives way to a world focused on market transactions and individualism, people start to question their most intimate attachments and their place in a changing society, leaving them to ask themselves: why live?

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Columbia Global Reports
• Erscheinungstermin: 9. September 2025
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9798987053751
• Artikelnr.: 73433049

Autorenporträt

Helen C. Epstein is Visiting Professor of Global Public Health and Human Rights at Bard College. She is the author of two previous books, including Another Fine Mess: America, Uganda, and the War on Terror (Columbia Global Reports). Her writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books and the New York Times Magazine, among other publications, and she has worked as a consultant for such organizations as the World Bank, UNICEF, and Human Rights Watch. She lives in New York City.