Economic uncertainty has caused suicide rates to spike among those aged 39 to 64, says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. By 2010, someone my age was more likely to die by their own hand than in a car.
The highest risk, the report said, was for people like me, in their 50s. These are the middle-management professionals made redundant by the explosion of the dot-com bubble early in the decade and by the housing bubble and Great Recession later in the decade.
I came close to being among those statistics.
After the dot-bomb, as I call it, my income fell from six figures to zero. I had joked during the boom that I would work for nothing. In 2002 and 2003, I did.
We moved our kids into public schools. We made a family pizza our Friday date night. We stopped buying books and went to the library. We stopped traveling, and I worried myself sick about money.
I was lucky. I was blessed with a wife whose employer suddenly began valuing her. Her parents helped, more than I was willing to admit at the time. We got through it.
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