ArticleAmerican journal of public health2018
America's Declining Well-Being, Health, and Life Expectancy: Not Just a White Problem.
Article in American journal of public health, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 58 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
58 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Can Social Policies Improve Health? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of 38 Randomized Trials.The Milbank quarterly · 2020Pooled it
- A growing socioeconomic divide: Effects of the Great Recession on perceived economic distress in the United States.PloS one · 2019Trial
- Alcohol Use Amongst Rural Adolescents and Young Adults: A Brief Review of the Literature.Psychological reports · 2026Review
- Trends in trajectories and incidence of functional impairment in middle-aged Americans.PloS one · 2026Article
- Deaths of despair in England, 2014-2022: trends by sex and socioeconomic deprivation before and after COVID-19.International journal of public health · 2026Article
- Mortality trends associated with hypertension and atrial fibrillation: A CDC WONDER data analysis.Global epidemiology · 2025Article
- Trends in chronic kidney disease-related mortality in older adults in the United States from 1999 to 2020: a cross-sectional study.Annals of medicine and surgery (2012) · 2025Article
- Is Life Unlivable for Youth in Post-DEI America?: Understanding Rising Suicide Rates Across Diverse Youth Groups Through Traditional Suicide Paradigms.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Educational disparities in 20-year trajectories of psychological well-being in a national sample.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Children's Health Lifestyles and the Perpetuation of Inequalities.Journal of health and social behavior · 2025Article
- Article
- Exploring patient perspectives on the impact of resuming cost sharing: a qualitative analysis.Trials · 2024Article
- Reevaluating the "deaths of despair" narrative: Racial/ethnic heterogeneity in the trend of psychological distress-related death.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Predicting U.S. county opioid poisoning mortality from multi-modal social media and psychological self-report data.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Futureproofing Social Support Policies for Population Health.The Milbank quarterly · 2023Article
- Income and rural-urban status moderate the association between income inequality and life expectancy in US census tracts.Journal of health, population, and nutrition · 2023Article
- Introduction to Special Issue: Interventions to Modify Psychological Well-Being and Population Health.Affective science · 2023Article
- World beliefs, character strengths, and hope for the future.PloS one · 2023Article
- Deaths of profound despair: A retrospective cohort study of mortality among people experiencing homelessness.PloS one · 2023Article
- Demographic and Geographic Variation in Fatal Drug Overdoses in the United States, 1999-2020.The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Although recent declines in life expectancy among non-Hispanic Whites, coined "deaths of despair," grabbed the headlines of most major media outlets, this is neither a recent problem nor is it confined to Whites. The decline in America's health has been described in the public health literature for decades and has long been hypothesized to be attributable to an array of worsening psychosocial problems that are not specific to Whites. To test some of the dominant hypotheses, we show how various measures of despair have been increasing in the United States since 1980 and how these trends relate to changes in health and longevity. We show that mortality increases among Whites caused by the opioid epidemic come on the heels of the crack and HIV syndemic among Blacks. Both occurred on top of already higher mortality rates among all Americans relative to people in other nations, and both occurred among declines in measures of well-being. We believe that the attention given to Whites is distracting researchers and policymakers from much more serious, longer-term structural problems that affect all Americans.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.