Want to die young? Vote Republican

Want to die young? Women were 40% more likely to kill themselves.” Referencing the researchers’ work, the BBC concluded: “Overall, they say, the figures suggest that 35,000 people would not have died had the Conservatives not been in power, equivalent to one suicide for every day of the 20th century or two for every day that the Conservatives ruled.” They added, as the last sentence of the article: “The UK Conservative Party refused to comment on the research.” More recently, here in the US, a 2014 study by Bandy X. Lee, Bruce E. Wexler, and James Gilligan published in the journal Aggression and Violent Behaviortitled Political correlates of violent death rates in the U.S., 1900–2010: Longitudinal and cross-sectional analysesfound pretty much the same outcomes as the result of Republicans versus Democrats running our country. Arguing that “violence is not random but a problem in public health and preventive medicine,” the researchers were blunt: “Suicide, homicide, and combined suicide/homicide rates from 1900 to 2010 were found to be associated with an increase under Republican presidents and a decrease under Democratic ones with statistical significance.” Yesterday I interviewed one of the researchers, forensic and social psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee MD, and she was emphatic about their findings: “My colleagues and I did a study about 10 years ago looking at the two different parties in the United States — not in terms of ideology or policies but purely in terms of violent death rates — and, astonishingly, we found that over a 110-year period, almost without exception, whenever there was a Republican president who was elected, the murder and suicide rates would double, and whenever there was a Democratic president elected the murder and suicide rates would halve.” She added that people don’t generally notice this because there’s a roughly 2-year time-lag between elections and the time the increases or decreases in suicide and homicide measurably set in. Back in 1996, Virginia Tech’s Dr. L. David Roper did a single-year analysis of suicide rates in states that voted for Democratic President Bill Clinton versus states that went for Republican Senator Bob Dole. “Simulations indicate that changing all policy domains in all states to a fully liberal orientation might have saved 171,030 lives in 2019, while changing them to a fully conservative orientation might have cost 217,635 lives.” NBC News, reporting on the study, quoted Syracuse University sociology professor Dr. Jennifer Karas Montez, one of the study’s authors, who summarized the consequences of states putting Republicans or Democrats in charge of policy: “This analysis points to another major player, and that’s state policymakers.