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Podcast: New Books in Medicine
Episode: Helen C. Epstein, "Why Live: An Anatomy of Suicide Epidemics" (Columbia Global Reports, 2025)
Description: What causes suicide epidemics—and how can we prevent them?
Many suicides are caused by biological mental illness, but sometimes the suicide rate of a particular group jumps—two-, three-, or even ten-fold—in a short time, behaving like an epidemic. Suicide epidemics unfold more slowly than microbial plagues like flu or malaria, but they happen far too quickly to result from genetic changes and affect far too many people to be explained away as spontaneous cases of brain injury.
These epidemics have occurred in America’s rustbelt towns, Russia’s cities, and indigenous communities from the A...