Hacker News Reader

Comment by manjushri | Hacker News Reader

Their "taking into account" seems like mere handwaving away. How would the ending of a civil war not be associated with an increase in mental health?

>The decline in pesticide suicides during this same period was larger than for overall suicides: from 8.5 to 4.2 per 100,000, a 50% reduction

The way they picked these statistics just seems self serving to their thesis. Another way of looking at the same numbers is that the drop in pesticide suicides accounted for only 10.75% of the total drop in suicides.

The fact that this study focuses only on the immediate tool used to kill oneself rather than the plethora of long term contributing social factors that lead up to a suicide shows a willful ignorance of the root problems.

View on HN

The standards sociological finding is that suicide is more likely to decline than rise during a war:

"Suicide rates are thought to fall during wartime. Durkheim [1] suggested this was due to increased social cohesion, while others have suggested that competing outcomes may be important, with individuals who might otherwise have died by suicide being more likely to die of other causes [2]. Neeleman [3] cites this as an example of contextual effect modification, with suicide risk modified by the likelihood of dying of other causes.

Examples of reductions in suicide rates in times of war have been described for several time periods and cultures [4-9]. Marshall [10] argued that the reduction in suicide rates reflected a reduction in unemployment, a recognised risk factor for suicide [11], rather than a direct effect of war, an argument offered some support by Lester and Yang [12]. Stack [13] suggested that the suicide rate decreased as the proportion of the population employed in military roles increased."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1526726/

Did you read the final conclusion of your study?

>Conclusion: In contrast to the established view, our findings suggest that compared to both the pre-War and post-War periods there was an increased likelihood of suicide during the Second World War if the overall declining trend is taken into account.

Moreover, the argument of "increased social cohesion" against a foreign enemy is not applicable to a civil war, where social cohesion has completely broken down.

That paper disagrees with the established view, but helpfully lays out what the established view is. Scanning papers on the topic it seems like there's mixed results war to war, and it depends what other things you try to control for - I think you could get to saying it's neutral but not that there should be a strong presumption that a war will suicide.

"the argument of "increased social cohesion" against a foreign enemy is not applicable to a civil war"

You'd get increased social cohesion among each of the ethnic groups which is in conflict with the other.

In any case this focus on the Sri Lankan civil war specifically isn't that interesting - I posted a review article above which includes controls and studies a wide range of cases across different countries, and concludes pesticide control has large effects.

> Their "taking into account" seems like mere handwaving away. How would the ending of a civil war not be associated with an increase in mental health?

From the paper:

> The temporal changes in suicide do not appear to correspond with the period of civil war (1983-2002).[27] By the time of the outbreak of the civil war in 1983, Sri Lankan suicide rates were already extremely high – 37.6 per 100,000 in 1982. In subsequent years, suicide rates stabilised. The civil war was still in progress at the time suicide rates began declining in 1995. By the time of the ceasefire in 2002 rates had already halved, and suicides rates were relatively stable in the 3 years after the ceasefire.

They also link to studies showing that wars tend to be associated with decreased the rates of suicide.

Considering the fluid nature of social dynamics, there still seems to be a relation there.

>By the time of the outbreak of the civil war in 1983, Sri Lankan suicide rates were already extremely high

Civil wars don't just spontaneously start for no reason. They start because people have been unhappy for a long time.

Notice also that the suicide rate began peaking during the Elam War II phase of the civil war, a time of "unprecedented brutality", and then began declining at the time of the ceasefire.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Lankan_Civil_War

Exactly I would bet the ending of the civil war is the real cause here, major improvement in the quality of life.

Dismissing the study on the grounds that "How would the ending of a civil war not be associated with an increase in mental health?" looks a lot like hand-waving to me.

Is mass murder a positive manifestation of mental health?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com