The United States has the highest rate of suicides compared with at least 10 other wealthy countries.
The finding, published Thursday in a report from the Commonwealth Fund, revealed that the suicide rate in the U.S. was 13.9 in 100,000 deaths, a rate double that of the United Kingdom. France was a close second to the U.S., at 13.1 in 100,000 deaths.
The Commonwealth Fund said it used data from 2016 for its report. Other countries in the report, in order of higher suicide rates to lower, were Australia, Canada, Norway, New Zealand, Switzerland, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Germany.
The study did not include suicide rates from low-income countries. According to the World Health Organization, 79% of global suicides occur in low- and middle-income countries.
The suicide findings were part of a larger picture the Commonwealth Fund painted of the U.S., showing that it has overall worse health outcomes than other developed nations despite spending more on healthcare as a share of its economy. In 2018, the U.S. spent 16.9% of its gross domestic product on healthcare, nearly twice as much as the average of the 36 countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
“In sum, the U.S. healthcare system is the most expensive in the world, but Americans continue to live relatively unhealthier and shorter lives than peers in other high-income countries,” wrote authors of the report.
Suicide rates in the U.S. have risen 30% in roughly two decades, becoming the 10th leading cause of death. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that 48,344 people killed themselves in 2018, the most recent year mortality statistics are available.
Authors of the Commonwealth Fund report blamed the high rate of suicide on untreated mental illness, lack of screening for mental health, lack of investment in social services, and people’s inability to pay for mental healthcare. The report does not make recommendations about access to firearms, which account for half of suicides.
Suicides are part of an uptick in the U.S. of what has become known in academic and media circles as “deaths of despair,” which have reduced average life expectancy. The term “deaths of despair” refers to deaths from suicides, alcohol misuse, and drug overdoses. As a result, people living in America die, on average, two years younger than other wealthy nations. The Swiss live the longest of any country in the OECD, at an average of five years longer than Americans.
