Deaths of despair were rising long before opioids

Long before opioids flooded communities, something else was quietly changing—and it may have helped set the stage for today’s crisis. A new study finds that as church attendance dropped among middle-aged, less educated white Americans, deaths from overdoses, suicide, and alcohol-related disease began to rise. The trend started years before OxyContin appeared, suggesting the opioid epidemic intensified a problem already underway.

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A new study suggests that falling participation in organized religion among middle-aged white Americans with lower levels of education may have contributed to the rise in so-called "deaths of despair." These deaths include fatalities linked to drug overdoses, suicide, and alcoholic liver disease.

The researchers found a clear pattern at the state level. States that experienced the sharpest drops in church attendance between 1985 and 2000 also saw the largest increases in deaths from these causes during the same period.

Deaths of despair are often associated with the arrival of OxyContin and other powerful opioids in the late 1990s. However, the new analysis indicates that the upward trend started earlier, at the same time religious participation began to decline.

"What we see in this study is the beginning of the story, before opioids became a major issue, and it shows rises in deaths of despair were already beginning to happen when the opioid crisis hit," said Tamar Oostrom, co-author of the study and an assistant professor of economics at The Ohio State University.

Oostrom worked on the research with Tyler Giles of Wellsley College and Daniel Hungerman of the University of Notre Dame. The study was published online in the Journal of the European Economic Association.