Daylight Saving Time Increases Suicide Rate | Hacker News Reader

Daylight Saving Time Increases Suicide Rate

www3.interscience.wiley.com

15 pointsnreece9 comments

What one has here appears to be a "natural experiment," in that the researchers looked at when daylight saving time began as a policy in Australia. (It is already known to suicide researchers that seasonal variation in daylight length is a strong risk factor for suicide, resulting in seasonal variation in suicide rates.) The way to check this conclusion would be to look at other countries (or states in the United States) where policies on daylight saving time have changed over the years. This is not an ideally controlled experiment,

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

but suicide data are gathered by a standard World Health Organization methodology all over the world,

http://www.who.int/topics/suicide/en/

and when other national policies change in a country, or differ between countries, it can be useful to look at whether or not those policy differences make a difference in suicide rates. Sleep regulation is well known to be an effective treatment for mood disorders, so this is a plausible correlation to look at to see if there may be a causal relationship between the policy and the medical outcome.

It seems like you could look just in the United States and compare Arizona with a state that has similar demographics. Arizona doesn't have daylight saving time.

Yeah, and parts of Indiana as I recall as well.

But the numbers may be too small, and the populations too unrepresentative, for this approach to be very useful.

While I can understand that shifting around the clock two times per year is annoying from an IT perspective, I for one really, really, really love the longer daylight in the evenings. Being able to walk home in daylight in the evenings, being able to be outside one hour longer in summer - all of it is such a nice thing to have.

If we were to stop shifting, I could live with that, if (and only if) we are constantly staying at DST and not at standard time.

Correlation != Causation

"the impact of small phase altering events is unclear".

according to the abstract the study suggests a link, not causation.

[edit] - depending on how you interpret the word "potentially". i read it as "a potential explanation for the phenomenon".

Not sure why the parent was downvoted. It's a perfectly reasonable criticism of the editorialized title of the submission. The actual article uses "associated with an increase" rather than "increases".

The editorialized title of the submission may have its problems, but "Correlation != Causation" and equivalent statements need to be consistently downvoted because they, as on every other site where they have for a while now been equally if not even more overused, have become the lazy man's catch-all content-free retort.

Much of what we take as certain once started with observed correlation. This trend of immediately and automatically discounting observed correlations will likely do more harm than good over time, as one would be hard-pressed to hypothesize and later prove (or at least fail to disprove, in the scientific sense) causation if one's habit were to always blurt "correlation != causation" in the face of new information.

I certainly felt crappier waking up this morning ;)

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