‘Deaths of despair’ have decimated my family. In Pa., it’s all too common.

I’m tired of funerals. To date, my aunt, uncle, dad, two first cousins, and now my best friend, Mike, have died of what many have come to call “deaths of despair.” While the official cause of death differs, they all died of the same pathology: a sense of hopelessness that, depending on individual circumstances, can be rooted in a range of factors, including deindustrialization and the (long overdue) gender role revolution.

Deaths of despair affect all Americans, but particularly working-class white men and women, who enter middle age shattered by life and die early deaths from addiction, suicide, and risky choices.

Pennsylvanians are all too familiar with this epidemic. In 2019, a study by the nonprofit groups Trust for America’s Health and Well Being Trust found that the state’s deaths of despair were 50% higher than the national average. In Southwestern Pennsylvania — an area profoundly impacted by the rise and fall of the glass, steel, and coal industries — deaths of despair are 22% higher than in suburban, affluent Bucks County. Northeastern Pennsylvania’s coal country is also home to some of the nation’s highest levels of poverty, hopelessness, and deaths of despair.

Estimates vary, but studies have shown that the rate of deaths of despair doubled between 2000 and 2017. Researchers from the University of West Virginia, another hot spot for such deaths, found that deaths of despair cost the American economy over $1 trillion annually. I’ve witnessed the very same forces at work in my native Ozarks and adopted Rust Belt home of Erie.

When the concept of deaths of despair — first coined by two Princeton professors in 2015 — entered the national lexicon, it was a personal revelation. I finally had the terminology that explained how my dad, aunt, uncle, and two first cousins had passed away at early ages. Mike, at age 50, was added to their ranks just a few weeks ago.

Mike died alone. His demise, like so many other deaths of despair, was a slow-motion suicide. Decades of chain-smoking may have led to Mike’s early death. But it was a lifetime of traumatic anxiety and a penetrating hopelessness that killed him. Loneliness took care of the rest. Never married, living alone, and without close friends nearby, he died at home, alone, of sepsis. The next day, it was workmates, not loved ones, who noticed his absence. They called the police for a wellness check.

Mike exemplifies the travails of so very many white working-class male Oregonians. As detailed in Richard V. Reeves’ seminal new work, Of Boys and Men, men have borne the brunt of many social changes. When working-class wages stagnated and industries decayed, the male’s traditional role as “provider” also disappeared. At the very same time, women (happily) experienced a revolution in their life possibilities. But men, especially working-class men of all races, have struggled in this transition.

Yes, men should better adjust to women’s liberation. But the reality is that once working-class men lost their “provider” function, many became lost. Socially isolated and disconnected from a nourishing family life, too many working-class men die young and alone.

I somehow avoided these maladies. After dropping out of high school, I entered college and matriculated to graduate school, which gave me the requisite exit velocity to escape the gravitational pull of class dysfunction. From this vantage point, I can see the struggles of the white working class and the American male more clearly.

Sadly, our political and cultural elites often ignore a community in crisis because it overwhelmingly votes for Donald Trump. Compassion is not a zero-sum game. One can racially reckon, support LGBTQ communities, and empathize with those whose political behavior is puzzling or unsavory. The cold reality is that the white working class remains the nation’s and Pennsylvania’s largest voting demographic.

The path out of Trumpist nihilism is an inclusive politics that acknowledges and responds with urgency to the profound dislocation felt by the white working class.

Jeff Bloodworth is a fellow with the Washington, D.C.-based Truman National Security Project and a professor of political history at Gannon University in Erie. @jhueybloodworth