Health status of White Americans

White Americans, as the majority and comparatively advantaged racial group in the United States, have historically had better health outcomes than other oppressed racial groups in America. However, in recent years, scholarly discourse has switched from recognition of the immense positive health outcomes of White Americans towards understanding the growing persistence of negative outcomes unique to this racial group. Scholars have discussed the effects of racial prejudice and their negative effect on health outcomes to not only those being oppressed, but also those being given privileges. In addition to the effects of living in a racialized society, White Americans have the highest rate of suicide and lifetime psychiatric disorders than any other ethnicity or racial category. In conjunction with these psychiatric issues, there are higher rates of alcohol usage as lower levels of psychological flourishing. In this context, flourishing is defined as a positive mental state associated with no mental disorders and high levels of psychological well-being. Given this information, the health status of White Americans has gained increasing importance due to the differences in health outcomes between White Americans and White people from other parts of the world.
Health advantages.
List of Comparative Health Advantages.
In 2007, the 15 leading causes of death in the US were recorded with a specific attention toward racial/ethnic health disparities. For 10 of those 15 causes of death, African Americans had higher rates of death.
The following list describes the categories in which Non-Hispanic Whites have ranked comparitively better than Blacks.
Life expectancy.
Generally, a country's life expectancy can be used to gauge the overall health of a population. Life expectancy is defined as the average number of years a group of infants would live if they were to experience the age specific death rates that are present in their year birth. White Americans have historically exhibited an advantage over large portions of the population. During the years of 1980 to 2014, White Americans had the longest life expectancy. Black people in the United States had the shortest life expectancy. However, Black men have higher racial differences in life expectency than Black women. These patterns can be identified throughout early childhood until advanced age when the differences become less severe. The differences seen in life expectancy are generally attributed to minoritized populations having an earlier onset of illness, greater severity of disease, and poorer survival rates.
Recent Declining Status.
In recent years, Whites have collectively experienced a consistently declining life expectancy. In particular, this trend is prevalent among non-college educated Whites and is largely related to the deaths of despair phenomenon. After 1998, other rich countries' mortality rate began to fall by 2% a year, which matched the average rate of decline seen in the US from 1978 - 1998. However, non-Hispanic Whites' mortality increased by .5%. These changes are specific to the age category within midlife.
Diseases of Despair.
In the United States, there is a classification of behavior-related medical conditions that is called the diseases of despair. The three different diseases in this category is drug or alcohol overdose, suicide, and alcoholic liver disease. The highest frequency of these deadly diseases is among middle-age working class White people. Scholars have raised the idea that diseases of despair are the result of worsening psychosocial problems that extend back well into the 1980's and are of concern to the United States as a whole. Although these behaviors are thought to be seen with groups who experience lack of social and economic mobility, there are increasing risk factors involved with poor mental health. A study published in 2009 found Black individuals to have higher rates of psychological flourishing than White individuals. Despite the vastly different economic trends for White and Black Americans, Whites are more likely to perceive themselves as having lower social class and are less optimistic about their financial future. This trend among middle class Whites points to increased need for research on the health status of Whites due to continuing rise in premature death caused by these diseases. Further, this trend exemplifies the problematic nature of research using Whites as a comparative standard to other ethnic and racial backgrounds in the United States.
Opioid Epidemic.
Between 2010 to the present, there has been an increase in opioid overdoses among White Americans, specifically in rural areas. Although this epidemic is not limited to White Americans, the increase in overdose deaths, emergency room visits related to opioid usage issues, and treatment for opioid addictions is well documented to be overwhelmingly White. The director of the Opioid Policy Research Collaborative at Brandeis University, Dr. Andrew Kolodny, attributes the disparate opioid usage among White Americans to physicians increased propensity towards prescribing narcotics to White patients. Rhetoric from the War on Drugs has led to the persistent misperception that Black and Hispanic individuals are more likely to use and become addicted to drugs. 
Effects of racial prejudice.
For the purposes of this article, the racism that is being referred to is a structural racism rather than interpersonal prejudice and discrimination. This system is composed of a unequal power dynamics that allows for members of the dominating social group to obtain unearned societal privilege through ideology and behavior without intention or dislike of the non dominant group.
Due to the racialized environment that people experience in the United States, scholars have wondered whether living in areas where there are high levels of racial prejudice will negatively impact the health of individuals living there. There are many pathways that link racism to poor health outcomes. Economic injustice and social deprivation, environmental and occupational health inequalities, psychosocial trauma, inadequate health care, state-sanctioned violence, alienation from property, and political exclusion are some of these pathways. While it has been understood that racism and prejudice negatively affect the health of the individuals who are being discriminated against, there is reason to believe that simply living in an area with racial disparities and tension can be harmful regardless of whether the person holds these beliefs or not. States in the US that had higher levels of "collective disrespect" toward Black people had higher age-adjusted mortality rates for both Black and White people. Collective disrespect level was measured through aggregate responses to a question given regarding people's attitudes toward why Black people had worse jobs, incomes, and housing than White people. Lee et al built off of these results by combining existing research to investigate the joint effects of mortality of community level and individual level racial prejudice. This study found that there was higher risks of mortality were associated with being male, advanced age, lower socioeconomic status, race, and being divorced or widowed. However, when community-level prejudice was added into their model, higher levels of anti-Black prejudice increased the odds of participant mortality by 31%. They also found a relationship between individuals with less attitudes of racial prejudice who lived in areas of higher community level prejudice to have the highest level of mortality risk compared even to individuals with higher racial prejudice living in higher prejudice communities. Consequently, community level racial prejudice is a stronger predictor of mortality than socioeconomic status and racial residential segregation.
Likewise, in a study done on Hurricane Katrina survivors, researchers measured the relationship between perception of racism against African Americans among White and Black Americans. Similarly to the previously mentioned study, they found that perceptions of racism against African Americans were associated with negative mental health outcomes for Whites. With all of this in mind, it is important to consider that measuring levels of racial prejudice and racial attitudes is complicated given the variability of the way prejudice is presented, and the confounding variable of implicit bias in an individual's evaluation of themselves.
"Dying of Whiteness (2019)".
In 2019 Dr. Jonathan Metzl published "Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America's Heartland". This book explores further the effects of living in areas with high levels of racial resentment and prejudice. The book also notes the hypocrisy of White people adopting political views that negatively affect the health outcomes of White Americans. For example, Metzl found that through an anti-government rhetoric, Whites tended to reject the Affordable Care Act expansion, oppose adoption of stricter gun laws, and resist tax cuts intended to build infrastructure in areas concentrated with working-class White populations. His ethnographic research for the book suggests that the politics of racial resentment creates sentiments about government that would ultimately harm life expectancy in a variety of ways for White individuals. The more concerning trend that this book reinforces is the lack of acknowledgement among White individuals of macro-level social determinants of health due to a focus on individual effort. This nostalgic ideation of hard-work and self-sufficiency negates the impacts of larger health factors and further creates an environment that is not conducive to positive health outcomes.
Comparison to other Whites around the world.
Compared to other White global populations, White Americans are at disparate risk of poor health outcomes partly due to the incidence of diseases of despair. The life expectancy of Whites in the United States ranks behind countries such as South Korea, Chile, Greece, Cyprus, and Cuba. In addition, when comparing the health of White Americans to White people from rich countries, there is better health outcomes for all ages from birth to age 75. Furthermore, Whites from the highest socioeconomic levels in America had comparable health outcome rates to Whites from England who had the lowest income and education levels. Malat et al developed a framework in 2016 that aims to understand the relationship between Whiteness and health. In a study of health disparities across Canada and the United States, the US consistently had far more pronounced racial health inequities. Furthermore, the extent of racial health inequities are heavily dependent on the society in which they are occur. These researchers describe the US as being characterized by racial and ethnic segregation, and policies that distribute health resources, housing, and education unequally.  
Listed below is a list of conditions the United States overall is consistently worse than the average for comparable high income countries (Austrailia, Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom)