ArticleSSM - population health2019
Growing sense of social status threat and concomitant deaths of despair among whites.
Article in SSM - population health, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
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Who cites it
30 citing papers in PubMed, 75 citations in OpenAlex.
- Trends in Alcohol-Related Deaths in the United States Over 55 Years: 1968-2023.Alcohol, clinical & experimental research · 2026Article
- Developmental Associations of Racialized Experiences and Attitudes in the 20s with Health Status Approaching Midlife.Journal of racial and ethnic health disparities · 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
- Exploring the influence of electoral political orientation on health outcomes: a scoping review.Cadernos de saude publica · 2026Article
- Goal-Striving Stress and Bodily Pain among Working-Age Black and White Americans.Journal of racial and ethnic health disparities · 2025Article
- Employment quality and suicide, drug poisoning, and alcohol-attributable mortality.American journal of epidemiology · 2025Article
- Healthy life expectancy by county, race, and ethnicity in the USA, 2009-19: a systematic analysis of health disparities.Lancet regional health. Americas · 2025Article
- The Role of Despair in Predicting Self-Destructive Behaviors.Population research and policy review · 2025Article
- Geographical variation in the long-arm of childhood.Health & place · 2025Article
- Replacement thinking, status threat, and the endorsement of political violence among non-Hispanic white individuals in the US: A cross-sectional study.Preventive medicine reports · 2024Article
- Are employment and social integration more strongly associated with deaths of despair than psychological or economic distress?Social science & medicine (1982) · 2024Article
- Fear of a Black Neighborhood: Anti-Black Racism and the Health of White Americans.Social forces; a scientific medium of social study and interpretation · 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
- Native American "deaths of despair" and economic conditions.Research in social stratification and mobility · 2024Article
- Necessary, burdensome, or threatening? Awareness of Black-White disparities in health care access and self-rated health for Black and White Americans.The American journal of orthopsychiatry · 2024Article
- Protecting traditional cultural food practices: Trends in diet quality and intake of ultra-processed foods by Indigenous status and race/ethnicity among a nationally representative sample of adults in Canada.SSM - population health · 2023Article
- Exposure to neighborhood poverty from adolescence through emerging adulthood and sleep duration in US adults.Health & place · 2023Article
- Perceived status threat and health among White Americans: A scoping review.SSM - population health · 2023Article
- World beliefs, character strengths, and hope for the future.PloS one · 2023Article
- "Outside the Skin": The Persistence of Black-White Disparities in U.S. Early-Life Mortality.Demography · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 5 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundA startling population health phenomenon has been unfolding since the turn of the 21st century. Whites in the United States, who customarily have the most favorable mortality profile of all racial groups, have experienced rising mortality rates, without a commensurate rise in other racial groups. The two leading hypotheses to date are that either contemporaneous economic conditions or longer-term (post-1970s) economic transformations have led to declining economic and social prospects of low-educated whites, culminating in "deaths of despair." We re-examine these hypotheses and investigate a third hypothesis: mortality increases are attributable to (false) perceptions of whites that they are losing social status.
methodsUsing administrative and survey data, we examined trends and correlations between race-, age- and, education-specific mortality and a range of economic and social indicators. We also conducted a county-level fixed effects model to determine whether changes in the Republican share of voters during presidential elections, as a marker of growing perceptions of social status threat, was associated with changes in working-age white mortality from 2000 to 2016, adjusting for demographic and economic covariates.
findingsRising white mortality is not restricted to the lowest education bracket and is occurring deeper into the educational distribution. Neither short-term nor long-term economic factors can themselves account for rising white mortality, because parallel trends (and more adverse levels) of these factors were being experienced by blacks, whose mortality rates are
conclusionRising white mortality in the United States is not explained by traditional social and economic population health indicators, but instead by a
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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.