Lack of data explains why
Ian Rockett has spent much of his career working closely with coroners and medical examiners researching the epidemiology of suicide. One of the questions the West Virginia University investigator has pondered over many years in the field is why the rate of suicide among Black people in the U.S. is recorded as a third of that among white people.
Numerous reasons underlie the absence of good statistics. Black Americans have typically been shut out of the mental health care system, and the pandemic worsened prospects of finding help. The lack of access to medical professionals means Black people are less likely to receive a mental health diagnosis, and there may be no record of previous suicide attempts prior to their death.
“Our research showed that when a medical examiner is writing a narrative for a Black person, there’s consistently less information recorded for a Black case, be it a suicide, homicide or an undetermined death,” says Nusrat Rahman, an author of the study and now a senior researcher at the American Psychiatric Association. Disparities in death investigations of Black people also relate to the absence of suicide notes, she says.
Black Americans were initially less exposed to the opioid epidemic because they were less likely than white people to be prescribed addictive drugs for pain. “This is one of those instances where discriminatory practices toward minority groups protected them early on,” Volkow says. But the landscape changed after the introduction of the narcotic fentanyl, which is mixed with illicit drugs such as heroin and cocaine and sold illegally.
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