Rugged Individualism and Suicide: Findings from the U.S.

Since the classic work by Durkheim, suicide has occupied a central place in the sociological imagination. In the Durkheimian spirit, a great deal of theoretical work has emphasized the concepts of social integration and social regulation. Relatedly, much empirical findings have emerged illustrating the relationships between the dual forces of integration and regulation and suicidality. In this study, I reorient the analytic focus to the role of culture, more specifically, rugged individualism. What is the relationship between individualistic cultural values and norms and lethal self-harm? According to Frederick Turner’s controversial ‘frontier thesis,’ the western expansion (1790 – 1890) has historically nurtured a culture of individualism that quintessentially defines the U.S. By merging historical data on the frontier experience and contemporary administrative data on suicide rates, I investigate how and to what extent culture of individualism associated with the western frontier is related to age-adjusted suicide rates across the U.S. counties. Adjusting for a battery of pre-treatment, i.e., geoclimatic, controls, I show that counties that experienced a longer exposure to the frontier line (proximity to the geographic area with less than 2 people per square mile) more than 130 years ago demonstrate higher suicide rates today. Results are robust to adding state fixed effects and accounting for spatial autocorrelation with clustered standard errors. In addition to running fixed effects models, I applied sequential G-estimation (designed to estimate average controlled direct effects) by including post-treatment covariates such as racial makeup, poverty rate, job growth, social capital, and family instability. This sensitivity analysis yields qualitatively identical findings. Implications are discussed concerning the enduring legacy of rugged individualism on contemporary suicide rates.