https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-role-of-marriage-in-the-suicide-crisis

JUNE 1, 2020

The Role of Marriage in the Suicide Crisis

America is in the middle of a suicide crisis. Since the turn of the millennium, the suicide rate has risen 35%, increasing year-on-year. In 2018, there were nearly 50,000 suicides, the highest per capita rate since the second World War.

As I've written at the Washington Free Beacon, this unprecedented spike resists easy explanation. Popular theories—the widespread availability of firearms, the rise of social media and the internet, and spiking "despair"—at best account for a fraction of the increase. As such, assuming that the crisis is multicausal, it is worth investigating the roll that changing social institutions play in mediating suicide risk.

Personal relationships, and marriage in particular, bear substantially on self-inflicted mortality risk, including suicide. As University of Maryland sociologist Philip N. Cohen noted in a working paper last year, the increase in overall mortality rates among white Americans—so-called "deaths of despair" attributed to "self-inflicted" causes like drug overdose, suicide, and alcohol abuse—is "limited almost exclusively to those who are not married, for men and women." Research from the National Longitudinal Mortality Study (NLMS) finds that divorced people, in particular, were twice as likely to commit suicide compared to married people.

Those findings comport with mortality data from the CDC's annual Multiple Cause of Death Files, adjusted for population estimates for different married groups based on the Current Population Survey's Annual Social and Economic Supplement.

The effect apparent from the population-level data is even more pronounced than that in the NLMS data. The suicide rate among divorced adults is more than three times that of married adults, while the suicide rate among singles is 1.5 to 2 times the rate among those who are married. In other words, marriage is a protective factor for suicide risk.

There are multiple stories that one could tell about this finding. Those who are more likely to marry may also be less likely to commit suicide, for reasons of personality, environment, or both. Socioeconomic status, in particular, mediates the relationship between marriage and suicide risk: increasing white mortality rates are driven by those at the bottom of the education distribution, who are also increasingly less likely to be married compared to their well-educated peers.

It is not implausible, however, that there is also some causal relationship between marriage and lowered suicide risk. Married people are on average happier. They also, definitionally, have at least one person to whom they are robustly socially linked—meaning they are less likely to be lonely, among other positive outcomes. Divorce, by contrast, is linked to depression in at least some people.

In assessing the relationship between marriage and the suicide spike, it is worth examining how the marital composition of the population has shifted over the past 20 years. In 1999, 58.6% of the over-18 population was married; in 2019, that figure was 54 percent. The single share of the population, meanwhile, rose from 24.4% to 29.6%, while divorced and widowed shares remained constant. In other words, America has grown slightly less married, slightly more single, selecting overall into a more suicide-prone category.

The evolution of military timepieces from pocket watches to Rolexes to G-Shocks

Miguel Ortiz June 16, 2020 19:37:23 EST

The year is 1945 and U.S. forces are taking back Philippine Islands from the Japanese.

Lt. Col. Henry Mucci and his 133 Rangers are staging a daring rescue of allied POWs at the Cabanatuan prison camp. Mucci checks his watch; it's time. At 1700 hours on January 30, the Rangers step off from their staging area at Platero. At 1745 hours, they reach their checkpoint at the Pampanga River and split into the two elements for the impending raid.

At 1800 hours, a P-61 Black Widow takes off from Lingayen Field. At 1855 hours, the pilot cuts the engines over the prison camp, drops altitude, and restarts his engines to produce loud backfires and simulate a crippled plane. He circles the camp at low altitude, continuously cutting and restarting his engines and causing an aerial spectacle for the next 20 minutes. This distraction turns the attention of the Japanese soldiers skyward and allows the Rangers to crawl undetected through the low grass leading up to the camp and take their positions for the raid. At 1944 hours, Lt. John Murphy and his support by fire element open up on the Japanese guard towers with a murderous crescendo of gunfire that signals the start of the raid.

The raid at Cabanatuan is just one example of the necessity for precise timing and synchronization in military operations. Before the advent of timepieces, the rising of the sun often served as a method of synchronization, with attacks occurring at first light. Although pocket watches were becoming more popular and commonplace in the late 1800s, they were not standard-issue in the military. The history of U.S. Military watches begins in the trenches of WWI.

The British Army experimented with the idea of a wrist watch a few decades before WWI in the Boer War, but the need for a timepiece worn on the wrist became more apparent in the trenches. During the war, officers would often signal the start of a synchronized charge against an enemy trench with the blow of a whistle. The timing of these attacks was crucial, with some being miles long. Holding a whistle in one hand and a pistol in the other, fumbling with a pocket watch just wasn't practical.

As a quick-fix solution, metal lugs were soldered on and leather or canvas straps were fashioned to convert a pocket watch to a wristwatch. Trench watches, as they were known, were generally made of chrome plate or solid silver to prevent rusting in the damp trenches. The crystals that covered the face of the watches were made of vulnerable glass. Officers with a bit more money would fit their watches with a protective metal cage called a shrapnel guard to prevent damage to the crystal.

By America's entry into the war in 1917, many doughboys headed for the western front were issued wristwatches. American watch companies like Waltham and Elgin provided the timepieces which were rushed into service. Because of the haste, only some of the watches were marked "ORD" (U.S. Ordnance).

The development of military wristwatches continued in the inter-war period. Following military specifications, Swiss manufacturer Longines released the A-7 pilot's watch for the Army Air Corps. Though new technology allowed watches to be made smaller while maintaining high levels of accuracy, the A-7 was oversized and resembled a canted pocket watch. Designed to be worn on the outside of a flight jacket, the watch's large size made it more legible for pilots who could check the time with a quick glance without having to remove their hands from the controls.