Reversals

If the literary critic Edmund Wilson is to be believed, San Diego was at one point in time the suicide capital of the United States. "On the West Coast today, the suicide rate is twice that of the Middle Atlantic coast, and the suicide rate of San Diego has become since 1911 the highest in the United States." He wrote in 1932.

"The Americans still tend to move westward, and many drift southward toward the sun. San Diego is situated in the extreme southwestern corner of the United States; and since our real westward expansion has come to a standstill, it has become a kind of jumping-off place." Wilson, in a fit of morbid fatalism, chalked some of this up to an attraction of both physically and mentally ill to San Diego. "The sufferers have a tendency to keep moving away from places, under the illusion that they are leaving the disease behind. And when they have moved to San Diego, they find they are finally cornered, there is nowhere farther to go."

Unsurprisingly, San Diego is no longer the suicide capital of the country, and California is ranks 43rd in the latest figures, so I think it's pretty safe to say Wilson might've been a little melodramatic.



But on a more curious note, the geographic grouping on a grander scale isn't entirely dissimilar. With the exception of South Dakota, the ten states with the highest suicide rates are all Western states. Las Vegas, perhaps understandably, is the city with the highest suicide rate, but Colorado Springs and Tucson, somewhat quizzically, are the second and third. I haven't been able to track down numbers beyond that.

"Here our people," Wilson says towards the end of his essay, "So long told to 'go West' to escape from ill health and poverty, maladjustment and industrial oppression, are discovering that, having come West, their problems and diseases remain and that the ocean bars further flight."

This is all, of course, a load of hooey. Factors like population density and urbanization are probably the real factors afoot. Then again, Arizona, which comes in at #6, has an urbanization rate of 88%.

As someone who spent his adolescence adjusting to coming West and his early adulthood generally exploring East, I've always thought "Go West" was less of a sensible ethos than "Just go, dammit". I suppose it might be a migration of youth thing. New York City - where I live now - has certainly long been a bastion of the American youthful escape, and it's only a Western destination if you live in New England.

Not that it's really financially possible for young people to escape to New York anymore, unless they happen to be feeding off either student loans or wealthy parents. But cities, of course, are perhaps used to role reversals.