This is easy to explain. ‘Death of despair’-related suicides, which are the kind that have been rising in most developed countries for the past few decades, are overwhelmingly a matter of people feeling stagnant or hopeless in their socioeconomic circumstances. Note drug-related issues are very often, if not usually, downstream from those socioeconomic issues.

And the answer is: when the rest of society slows down, suddenly those who couldn’t keep up don’t feel so behind.

The only reason this comes as a surprise to so many people is that capitalism suggests that all progress is inherently good with no contingencies, or it draws a binary between progress and regression. Associated with that is American hyper-individualism. Ask a Marxist, for example, and they will offer an understanding of society which centers those who reproduce it, and along with that a sophisticated interest in theories of alienation and the role alienation plays in a person’s relations to their society. For a Marxist, these statistics would have been expected.