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HARTMANN: Suicide. Pretty grim stuff. I’ll just say this straight up and let all the Conservative heads explode.

The suicide rate among middle-aged Americans climbed 28 percent in the last ten years. Twenty eight percent! It was most pronounced among White men and women in that age group where it jumped 40 percent. There is speculation that the reason why it didn’t go up as much, in fact it went up very little, among African Americans and Hispanics is that they were already not doing as well economically and they had better support networks through Churches and communities and tight families as a consequence of being generally lower on the socioeconomic ladder. So there is this middle age, middle income bubble that people find themselves in where they don’t have a network of friends and they are not part of a church or a group and things fall apart for them economically.

Middle-age Whites 35 to 64 years old had a 40 percent increase in suicide rate. Overall, 28 percent increase in the suicide rate. People ages 35 to 64 account for 57 percent of all suicides in the United States. In 2010 suicide became the tenth leading cause of death and what’s interesting is that this is not because of returning Iraq War veterans. They are kicking up our suicide rates, but this is not returning Iraq and Afghanistan veterans since they are not 35 to 64 years old, they tend to be younger people.

The West and the South had the highest rates and one factor may be cultural differences in the willingness to seek help during tough times. It’s also harder to find counseling in mental health services in the South and the poor parts of the West. This is from a report by Mike Stobbe in Huffington Post “Suicide Rate Rises Among Middle-Aged In The U.S., CDC Reports”. These are statistics from the Centers for Disease Control or CDC.

Now why would I say this is Reaganomics causing this? Or the bad economy? Or the Bush recession? I think it’s Reaganomics. Well, I go back to a piece I’ve been talking about since we started the show ten years ago which was on the 18th of September 2002 on the BBC News world edition. It’s still on their website and you can easily Google it. The headline is: “More suicides under Conservative Rule”, BBC 2002. You can find it.

And, I’ll just share a few sentences out of it: “The suicide rate increases under Conservative governments, research suggests. Australian scientists found the suicide rate in the country increased significantly when a Conservative Government was in power. And an analysis of figures in the UK seems to suggest a similar trend.” Now, they were looking at suicide rates from 1901 to 1998 — that’s virtually an entire century. And then they said there’s things we need to factor out of this, so the researchers took into account periods of drought and World War 2 because of their economic and psychological effect. Suicide rates were actually higher during periods of drought and lower during World War 2. But they factored those out so they could get good clean numbers and could look at just Conservative vs. Liberal running the Government. After adjusting for these factors, the BBC writes (and by the way, this was not a by-line piece or an op-ed, this was a news story) that after adjusting for these factors the figures clearly showed the highest rates of suicides occurred when both Conservative State and Federal Governments were in power. They are looking at the entire Twentieth Century.

Conversely, the lowest rates of suicide occurred when both State and Federal Governments were both Labour, in other words, what we would call here in the U.S. The Democrats. Middle Aged and older people were most at risk when Conservatives ruled both State and Federal Governments. Men were 17 percent more likely to commit suicide than when Labor was in power and women were 40 percent more likely to kill themselves. The authors argue that Conservative rule traditionally implies less interventionist and more market oriented policy than Labour rule. They’re not really sure exactly why this is.

The lead researcher, Professor Richard Taylor, of the University of Sydney, told BBC News Online: “We think that it may be because material conditions in lower socioeconomic groups may be relatively better under Labour because of government programmes, and there may be a perception of greater hope by these groups under Labour. There is a strong relationship between socioeconomic status and suicide.” According to the BBC article, “The original research was published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. And then in a series of accompanying editorials, Dr. Mary Shaw and colleagues from the University of Bristol say the same patterns were evident in England and Wales between 1901 and 2000. Rates have been lower under Labour Governments and soared under the last Conservative regime, which began in 1979 under Margaret Thatcher. They fell under ‘the more moderate’ John Major and after a slight rise when Tony Blair came to power, have since fallen again.”

Now this was in 2002 so you still had Labour or the Democrats as it were, in charge of the UK. Again, from the BBC article: “Overall, they say, the figures suggest that 35,000 people would not have died had the Conservatives not been in power . . .” between 1901 and 1998. And then the article lists every single period and who the people were in power all the way up to 1998 when the study was concluded. The article was published in 2002 by the BBC.

We’ve had Conservative rule in the United States. I mean, you could call Bill Clinton a Liberal if you want, but Reaganomics was never repudiated. Bill Clinton did not take us back to Lyndon Johnson or Franklin Roosevelt. He didn’t take us back to the Great Society or the New Deal. In fact, he undid parts of the Great Society by ending welfare as we know it. And, I don’t mean this as an indictment of Bill Clinton, I think he did the best he could do, given what he had and what the times were, but basically the Obama Administration and the Clinton Administration have not been New Deal Administrations.

Reaganomics has been the economic policy of this country ever since 1981 and now we’re seeing the rise in suicides as a consequence of that. If the BBC can say as a statement of fact that 35,000 people wouldn’t have died if Conservatives had never been elected to run the British Government, you have to wonder how many people would not have taken their own lives had Bill Casey not cut a deal with the Ayatollah to keep the hostages so that Jimmy Carter would lose the election and Ronald Reagan became President in 1980. You just have to wonder. If we’d never tried this experiment of trickle down economics and Reaganomics and we’d stuck with what worked.

Take a look at the BBC article.

Take a look at Thom Hartmann’s website.

SONALI KOLHATKAR IS ON MATERNITY LEAVE.