The differences in our experiences may be less than I made it seem, although my experiences are far from typical in any sense. My extended family in my town stems from having lived long enough that my nephew is married. At easter dinner I had some fun using the same name to call upon my mother, my partner, my sister-in-law, and my nephew’s bride. Through my own three marriages, I have extended family around here going back four generations, close family that goes back two hundred years in Tennessee and is scattered all over the South, and my two oldest children have kin (no longer mine) that have lived in the Seattle area for nearly a century.

The urban West, the South, and the semi-rural West are all mine by marriage, while my biological family are true nomadic Westerners. My uncles and cousins are concentrated in Iowa (where my parents were born) and the wetter side of Washington (where my mother was raised), and my siblings range from Puget Sound to Virginia. As an Air Force brat, I lived in many places from Baudette, MN to the Llano Estacado south of CO, but mostly in Washington and Oregon. In contrast to my Nez Perce friends, I utterly lack a concept of extended family–I do wish to stress that such rooted Native communities are endemic to the West and have family and ethnic ties of the sort well beyond the fantasies of the descendants of Thomas Jefferson in Virginia.

It is easy to generalize about the West, but such generalizations–even when offering a lot of truth–break down. Historiann’s point about guns is a case in point. To learn that westerners do not lead in per capita gun ownership runs against common sense, but “facts is facts”. I doubt that gun ownership is a major contributing cause to higher suicide rates in the region, although it may be easy to blame.

If the rates are higher in eastern Oregon and Washington than in western Oregon and Washington, then the stereotypes about rural isolation, my extension of White’s note of self-identity self-deception, and even gun ownership all correlate. Finding causes is another matter. Guns offer a means, but so do cars and pharmacies. I would guess that vehicle ownership is higher in the rural west–where one often needs three Fords to keep one running, and driving fifty miles to the grocery store is normal for some folks–than in the rural east, or in the I-5 corridor from Vancouver BC to Portland and Salem OR.

And, although Historiann thinks that gun ownership rates are high around here (maybe it’s just the lib’rul professor types I hang out with?), it turns out that the West doesn’t have a patch on either the South or Midwest, which both have higher rates of gun ownership. (But there may well be pockets, like Colorado Springs, that have very high rates of gun ownership compared to the rest of the region and nation–and a military supercity like the Springs could probably be one of them.)

But your question about the military and suicide rates is a good one–one I don’t have the data for though, I’m afraid. Military populations tend to be disproportionately male and young, people disconnected from family and other support networks, and heavily armed, which is a volatile mix.

However, I am not one to go down without a fight either. It seems that Washington is not on Historian’s list of states with exceptionally high suicide rates—and its location of the West coast and ample natural resources may have made it more conducive to earlier and permanent settlement than interior states like Colorado and Arizona, which lacked sufficient resources to support large populations until dams were built during the Roosevelt years.

Having been prodded by the two of you to complicate my question, I wonder what other factors play in here as well—Does a high military presence increases suicide rates? Historiann’s gun theory seems to suggest it would.
What class of people are committing suicide? My peers in suburban Colorado seemed to struggle with depression to a much greater extent than my peers from Minneapolis. However, this may merely have been a result of the fact that high school generally sucks for everyone…

Mary,
I don’t know ’bout “weaker” ties to family, ethnic, or other groups. Some of the folks I know have been living in the same place for 10,000 years. My family are immigrants–I’m 4th generation American West, 2nd Washington state. I see my kin plenty, but we leave our guns locked up during the gatherings.

Nevertheless, I think some scholars have noted western mobility as conferring somewhat weaker family and ethnic ties than you might find among Southies in Boston, for example, or New York’s “Little Italy”.

Perhaps the cultural myth of the rugged individual rests uneasily on people who rely disproportionately on the largess of the federal government. For those who can’t make a living without government aid, this dependence may exacerbate self-destructive tendencies in those who are predisposed to depression and mental illness.

And, of course, this “rugged individual” is not a genderless person, he’s a man, right? I wonder what the gender breakdown is for Western suicides–if they’re predominantly male or female. Ring’s article doesn’t specify where he got his data, or what the breakdown is along gender lines.