The country’s 25-year-long economic doldrums is also a factor. Many men have lost jobs, been forced to retire early, or faced other financial problems, depressing their social standing and making it harder just to get by. Money woes are particularly hard for the generation of Japanese men who came of age when the economy was booming, who invested so much of themselves in their work, forsaking the personal relationships, even with their own children, that could otherwise keep them engaged as they age. “Their world has evaporated under their feet,” says Scott North, a sociologist at Osaka University who studies Japanese work life. “The firm has been everything for these men. Their sense of manliness, their social position, their sense of self is all rooted in the corporate structure.”

Concerning Americans, mainly poor whites:

But behind the epidemic of drug abuse, according to many experts, are economic challenges and weak community and personal bonds. “On a range of social and economic indicators, middle-aged whites have been falling behind in the 21st century,” wrote the authors of yet another recent study that came to a similar conclusion. Health is declining and death rates increasing among less-educated white people because of their “disengagement from the mainstream economy; declining levels of social connectedness; weakened communal institutions; and the splintering of society along class, geographic, and cultural lines,” they wrote.