Deaths Of Despair: Two Georgia Counties Show Stark Contrast

You might assume that states wrestling with premature death from suicide and substance abuse were places of failure and decline, where the human toll of disappointment illustrates bigger problems about life. But America is more complicated than that. Understanding the evolving human condition can require both flying overhead at 30,000 feet and walking the streets on your own two feet before rustling around in the data to see where the story’s hiding.

In the last decade, Georgia has grown more than most American states, adding more than a million people between the just-released Census and the previous one. Georgia is part of the wider trend of population shift from the Northeast and Midwest to the South and West. It is now the eighth-most populous state and floats around the national average and the median of the 50-state rankings for household income. The sprawling Atlanta metro continues to send out its concrete and asphalt fingers into surrounding counties, and is now one of the 10 largest in the U.S., with a population of more than 6 million people. It also holds 10 of the American Communities Project’s 15 types.

Georgia is diverse: home to large and growing Latino and Asian populations, and one of the largest Black populations of the 50 states, some 4 million strong. Georgia presents America in microcosm in many ways: racially and economically diverse, home to a vast, sprawling metropolitan area as well as to many small rural counties where demographics have changed little in the last century.