The eCrozier

A dear friend, a trail-blazing palliative care doctor who specialized in caring for dying children, once told me: “My job is to deal with the pain. Modern medicine can now treat most people’s pain, at least make it endurable. Your job (I was his parish priest) is to help people make sense of the suffering. Pain and suffering are two different things. Pain is physical. Suffering is spiritual.” My friend took his own life a few years later. His suffering must have been unbearable, but he never let on how much.

America’s suicide rate, as a percentage of our population, continues to grow, alarmingly so. It’s one factor that has led to life expectancy in the U.S. actually falling for three years in a row. That hasn’t happened since the years of WWI. No developed nation over that time period has seen that happen. It’s happened only in the U.S. Let that sink in for a moment. We’re “Number One” in a way we shouldn’t want to be.

Add to that the rapidly increasing death toll from drug overdoses and alcoholism (and those can reasonably be seen as “suicide by another name”). We have a trifecta of a crisis. Hundreds of thousands of us each year are dying from this crisis and the number of deaths is still rising. If these deaths were attributed to terrorism, then we’d be mobilizing a nation-wide effort to address the crisis. But we’re not, are we?

Too many people, especially those with the power to do something about it, still see those three things as signs of moral weakness and thus label the suffering as those people simply getting their “just deserts.“ Their rationale, one based on Social Darwinism, goes something like this: “Those people just need to stop complaining, get a grip, and take charge of their lives. If they’re unwilling to help themselves, why should we?” But such thinking assumes the fault lies with the individual alone. It doesn’t.

Even if we wish to be unmerciful in our assessment, our own self-interest (enlightened or otherwise) should lead us to prioritize a robust intervention. Our society can’t sustain this trajectory much longer. And any successful intervention will have to understand the nature of the suffering occurring. The data shows us that the primary source of the suffering is a profound despair. Many are experiencing this despair as our economy changes and the prospect for a living wage is out of reach. So, while addressing this has economic ramifications, we should see this as a spiritual crisis of despair. Too many people have lost hope for their future. Many in the working class today, according to the data, suffer from broken families caused by suicide, alcoholism, and drug addiction. People are literally dying from despair.

Our economy for more than 200 years has helped us become the most prosperous country in human history. But now, that very same economy is devastating many working-class families. While the crisis has spiritual consequences, the solution isn’t just more politicians offering their prayers (although prayer is always needed). The solution requires us to jettison Social Darwinism as the lens we use to understand this crisis. Compassion and mercy will actually be the most effective social strategy going forward.

+Scott