Opinion: A national resilience strategy can help prevent deaths from despair
A comprehensive National Resilience Strategy that focuses on prevention, early identification of issues, and effective treatment can help prevent so-called deaths from despair.
Deaths from alcohol, drugs, and suicide occur so often — 1 million in the last decade — that there’s a name for them: deaths from despair. And the situation may get worse. According to a study that the Berkeley Research Group did for our organizations, the Trust for America’s Health and the Well Being Trust, deaths from despair could total 1.6 million between 2016 and 2025, a 60 percent increase over the previous decade. And that might be a conservative estimate.
The only good thing about these numbers? They’re projections. They’re what
