Death and the Social
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Disease of despair
12 min read
The central concept of the article - the epidemiological phenomenon of rising mortality from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism among working-class Americans, coined by economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton
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John Brown (abolitionist)
16 min read
The article references DuBois's biography of John Brown and his personal tragedies as context for understanding how individual suffering connects to broader social questions like slavery
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Poor relief
11 min read
The article draws a direct parallel between Joseph Townsend's 18th century arguments against the Poor Laws and modern neoliberal welfare policy, making the historical context essential for understanding the critique
When my stepmother died it rained during her funeral. This was highly unexpected as California was in the middle of a three-year drought and there was no rain in the forecast that afternoon. As far as I can tell, this was a total weather anomaly. She was the sort of person that would have seen the rain as a spiritual sign, and likely as a good omen. And we celebrated it as such. It was a difficult funeral because she died too young. Something didn’t feel right about the whole thing, not necessarily because of the specific dynamics and events that led to her death but because I began to see her death as part of a far wider social breakdown. Once you experience half a dozen people that die too young, too unexpectedly and too untimely, the social dimension of their deaths start to come into focus.
The thing about social deterioration is that it is not understood as a social phenomenon to those most acutely affected by it. Nowhere is this more evident than in the deaths of despair. I’ve come to see these deaths of despair, or deaths from alcohol and drug overdoses and suicide up close. I want to get a few things off my chest about them. Those who are dying from these deaths of despair tend to lead lives that have a hidden dimension of struggle and toil. It is as if the social existence of their subjectivity has become invisible to others. We seem to have lost the basic common sense to link these deaths to something that is locatable in a common social cause. We don’t die social deaths anymore.
The deaths of despair are a class and economic phenomenon primarily but they are not reducible to that precisely because the immensity of these deaths produce a deeper spiritual, moral and cultural crisis. From 2015 - 2025 it is estimated that over 1.5 million people have died in America from drug and alcohol overdoses and suicide. Social scientists will tend to posit ‘multi-causal’ factors for what drives these deaths of despair, and they eschew ‘poverty’ as the primary cause. However, empirical studies have shown that income inequality and lower rates of social mobility are directly associated with higher death rates from suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol-related liver disease among workers. A 2025 study noted that although overdose deaths increased over 2000–2019 generally,
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