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.