Press Herald interviews Sorg about rising suicide rate among middle-aged Mainers
The Portland Press Herald spoke with Marcella Sorg, a research professor of the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine, for the article, “Suicide rate climbing among middle-aged Mainers.” The number of Mainers who killed themselves in the 45–64 age group increased from 47 in 1999 to 102 in 2013 before declining to 86 in 2014, the latest year for which statistics are available, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Experts say one possible contributing factor to the rise in suicides is the surge in opioid addiction — including prescription opioids and heroin, according to the article. Maine experienced 272 drug overdose deaths in 2015 and 208 in 2014, with the vast majority caused by heroin, fentanyl or prescription opioids, according to the 2015 Maine drug death analysis conducted by Sorg for the state medical examiner’s office. Sorg said that for budgetary reasons, Maine does not conduct toxicology reports for suicides that are not drug overdoses, so it’s unknown, for instance, whether people who committed suicide with a firearm had opioids in their system when they died. Sorg said more of the drug overdoses also are suicides, but Maine does not categorize them as suicides unless a note was left or there was some other compelling evidence pointing to suicide, the article states. “We don’t know whether it was a suicide in many cases. It’s a gray area,” Sorg said.