Misery Needs Company: Contextualizing the Geographic and Temporal Link Between Unemployment and Suicide

Conclusions that unemployment produces suicides face a problem. Despite a surfeit of studies, how aggregate levels of unemployment influence individuals’ suicide risk remains unclear. This raises concerns about the role of context on individual life chances, the linchpin of sociology’s fundamental contribution. Drawing on a methodological expansion of the novel harmonized data set, Multilevel Suicide Data in the U.S. (2005-2017, 37 States), we corroborate the importance of cross-level sociodemographic homogeneity (i.e., “sameness”) for understanding the unemployment-suicide relationship. We show that the risk of suicide is significantly lower when unemployed individuals live in a community of high, but not low, unemployment. The sameness effect of employment status is larger among the unemployed than among the employed or those not in labor force. Across time, the magnitude of this local sameness effect differs by the state of the economy, being smaller at moments when unemployment rates are higher nationally (e.g., during the 2008-9 Great Recession). These results suggest an underlying mechanism of “situational awareness” by which local and global economic conditions signal the fate of similar others to unemployed individuals, alleviating the stigma of unemployment (e.g., shifting their perception of the meaning of unemployment from a personal failure to a system failure). We discuss how this complex view of the sameness effect helps us understand why suicides among unemployed individuals continue to increase even when economic crises abate and unemployment declines.