WP22/11: Associations between deaths of despair and health and social disadvantage
Designation
Working Paper 22/11
Proposed authors
Leah Richmond-Rakerd
Stephanie D’Souza
Signe Hald Andersen
Barry Milne
Concept
Rising mortality from suicides, drug poisonings, and alcoholic liver disease among working-age adults is well-documented in the United States. Although such “deaths of despair” are not rising at the same rate in other industrialised nations, they may cluster among individuals who disproportionately experience other disadvantages. Unequal experiences of health and social disadvantage tend to aggregate within individuals, such that multiple, different health and social problems are disproportionately experienced by the same small segment of citizens. This study tested whether concentration and accumulation of health and social disadvantage forecasts deaths of despair, in New Zealand and Denmark.
Data sources
We will conduct the New Zealand component of the research using the following tables from the Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI):
- Life event data
- Person overseas spell
- Publicly funded hospital discharges
- Court charges data
- Benefit dynamics data
- Mortality data