Earlier this month, the New York Times published an article titled ‘The Age of American Despair‘ in which this question was posed: “Are deaths from drugs and alcohol and suicide a political, economic or spiritual crisis?”

The article states: “The working shorthand for this crisis is ‘deaths of despair’, a resonant phrase conjured by the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton to describe the sudden rise in deaths from suicide, alcohol and drug abuse since the turn of the millennium.

“Now a new report from the Senate’s Joint Economic Committee charts the scale of this increase — a doubling from 22.7 deaths of despair per 100,000 Americans in 2000 to 45.8 per 100,000 in 2017, easily eclipsing all prior 20th-century highs.

“But had deaths of despair remained at 2000-era levels, approximately 70,000 fewer Americans would have died this year alone.”