Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland

by Jonathan M. Metzl

Yet there is a crack in this enlightenment narrative. What if suicide researchers are barred by their own government from obtaining federal funding to research or compile data about the leading method of lethal suicide in the United States? The method of suicide that kills more Americans than all other intentional means combined, including hanging, poisoning, overdosing, jumping, suffocating, or cutting? The method that kills more Americans than all of the murderers, robbers, terrorists, and attackers put together as well?8 This is not a what-if scenario—it was a reality in the United States for much of the early parts of the twenty-first century.