Why suicide is falling around the world, and how to bring it down more
amp.economist.com
amp.economist.com
Literally every single person contemplating suicide has access to means. Every single one. No matter how much regulation is imposed which is why it is stupid to attempt to regulate to begin with and usually used as a means to push a secondary agenda. Even someone strapped to a bed and force fed will eventually die from the process.
The only cure for suicide it access to mental health assistance and reasonable living conditions. Even that won't "cure" someone who truly wants to die.
Also I very much appreciate your bad-faith implication that I have a mental disability. Thanks for that.
Remember this one too: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Your comment might get hidden because it was flagged, but your points need to be addressed. Suicide contemplation is a function of desire, so restricting access to means may help deter some of the people who have a weaker desire to commit suicide.
> The only cure for suicide it access to mental health assistance and reasonable living conditions. Even that won't "cure" someone who truly wants to die.
This may be the best long term "solution" to suicide. The fundamental problem isn't that people are killing themselves, it's that people want to be dead. It seems unscalable to try and "solve" the problem by banning every conceivable thing that could be used as a weapon. That doesn't solve the problem any more than spraying green paint on diseased grass fixes your yard; it is a superficial fix.
Society should be measured not only by its economic output, but also by the percentage of people who would rather be dead than live in it. You can't conclude if a monkey has patience if you don't give it access to a banana. Only when the monkey has access to the banana and refuses it, can you conclude that the monkey has learned patience.
There have been a number of natural experiments that have shown this: when the UK switched from coal gas to natural gas, or when catalytic converters were introduced.
You can probably find research to support this on the NCISH website.
In an ideal world, all problems could be fixed at their source, but in practice, we shouldn't limit ourselves to only solutions that target the source of the problem. As a much simpler example, it's common and pragmatic to take painkillers to treat headaches, even though they certainly don't make any attempt at fixing the source of the headache.
Gun control (and other forms of means restriction) is effective at preventing suicides. It's not a satisfying solution (after all, the people it saves are still miserable), but it works, as indicated by many studies. That doesn't mean we shouldn't dig into why people want to kill themselves and try to fix those (like with mental health treatment or more proactively helping people maintain financial or social stability); I think we should probably take both approaches simultaneously.
From my understanding, people with mental health issues may be more likely to consider suicide. So my opinion is that suicide should be considered a symptom of an illness that needs medical attention as opposed to an inalienable right like free speech.
That said, I do also agree that in some cases, not all, suicide is a symptom of an illness.
I think the way of reconciling these two positions is to make mental healthcare ubiquitous with low barriers to access - and help people to get in to care earlier before things escalate. Additionally, our national policies should seek to minimize the number of 'dead ends' in people's lives without opportunity to move forward or upward.
I, personally, have come to the sad conclusion that I cannot trust my mind to act in my best interest at all times. In the past, I have made the decision to kill myself, and if I had access to a gun, I likely would not be alive today. I'm happy to be alive, and I'm grateful to live in a culture where guns are rare. I worry about getting into that mental state again, so as one preventative step, I make sure to never own a gun and never live with people who own guns.
There are plenty of milder analogies that I think are relatable to a lot of people, like limiting the amount of unhealthy food you have at home to avoid mindless snacking. If unlimited Cheetos were available to everyone all the time, it would probably make the world a worse place.
In your analogy, isn't the gun the painkiller?
The body faces [problem with complex causes] and wants to respond with [overreaction resulting in severe outcome]. Rather than addressing the causes, you take an approach that replaces [severe outcome] with a more appropriate [less bad outcome].
In the suicide situation, the severe outcome is death and the less bad outcome is significant emotional pain. The overreaction is the tendency of depressed people to believe that death is the best choice, even though they would not make that decision after careful thought in a clear state of mind.
In the headache situation, the severe outcome is a headache and the mildly bad outcome is the lingering pain even after painkillers and the inconvenience of having to take them. The overreaction is the continued pain inflicted on the person, even when all reasonable steps have already been taken.
So no, the equivalent of the painkiller is the restriction of guns. Both reduce the severity of outcome, but neither helps with the underlying problem.
Reducing access to means and methods is known to work to reduce the numbers of people who die by suicide.
> in America is up by 18% since 2000 ... The rise is largely among white, middle-aged, poorly educated men in areas that were left behind by booms and crushed by busts
> Because farming involves killing things, rural folk are likelier to have the means to kill themselves—guns, pesticides—to hand
> Unemployed people kill themselves at around two-and-a-half times the rate of those in work
> the most effective measure of all is limiting access to guns. Half of all Americans who commit suicide shoot themselves, and the overall rate in America is about twice that in Britain, which has strict gun controls. The difference in gun ownership largely accounts for the state-by-state variation in suicide rates
Unlike the worldwide decline, the rise in America is linked to such a specific cultural subgroup that I'd love to know how the suicide rates compares between different populations within America
Although that article is about gun deaths in general, at the end you can explore the data choosing suicide as the gun death category and comparing the different demographics.
This means guns. And that is why right now this post is full of mean spirited comments. It is a shame that cannot be a sincere discussion about guns even when it relates to suicide and the lives it could save.
Removing means doesn't fix the underlying problems, and it smacks of agenda pushing to suggest otherwise (even if it's a good agenda).
From a quick google search https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22726520
> Although some individuals might seek other methods, many do not; when they do, the means chosen are less lethal and are associated with fewer deaths than when more dangerous ones are available.
The general explanation is that many suicides are somewhat spur of the moment, and access to an easy way to kill yourself when you have those moments of weakness increases the chance that a person will follow through. People have this sense that suicides are well thought out decisions that people make when they conclude that their life isn't worth living anymore, but that isn't the case most of the time.
https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis/supplement...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-firearms-suicides/...
Doesn't mean it's causal, maybe there are confounding factors, but the relationship itself does exists.
With that said, if people are committing suicides I think it's better to look at why they are committing suicides, and then fix that.
Anti-gun is safety/medical arguments: Guns are a clear hazard to personal safety, and removing them from circulation will reduce the number of gunshot wounds and associated deaths, etc. This position is based on the ongoing massive human carnage committed with guns which has been going on for hundreds of years and is creating fresh corpses daily.
Pro-gun is political/self defense arguments: hundreds of years of European history where the rulers could carry weapons and the ruled could not, disarmament as a prelude to oppression/massacre in 20thC, distant or incompetent law enforcement meaning safety can only be provided by the individual.
I'm not sure if there is a way to bridge the gap between different value systems. For me personally I'm not going to buy firearms illegally, but I will never be happy about being a 2nd class citizen in my own country.
* A memory of how painful and fearful they were while in the act.
* Actual medical treatment and resources.
* Awareness in those they know and work with.
* Maybe, a more stable place in their community.
And yet they are ignored, time and time again. Even mentioning that men could have a problem that society could help solve will be met with great resistance. As we know, there's a never ending effort to get women into stem, to empower girls, to elevate women in society. Which can be good but it seems the pendulum has swung so far in that direction that men are now viewed as "the problem". It seems to me that technology is one of the last areas where men actually succeed but there's a great deal of effort put into place to remove that success.
Women now outnumber men greatly in university. Is there a point where we collectively step back and acknowledge the great gains women have had in society; so great that they now have a very real advantage over men?
In addition to suicide, men are imprisoned at a much higher level than women: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...
This seems like a problem at least worth acknowledging.
As a very broad brush, assuming a positive and not-toxic workplace, adequate compensation WITH a proper balance of work/life is probably the next wrong to look at. Multiple branching career paths that don't derail when taking time off for kids is probably another.
However, in general, US (and western) society is bi-modal school/work/being "productive" on one path and kids on the other. It does an astoundingly poor job of building stable communities, particularly as for at least two generations "The American Dream" has been dying/dead.
What evidence do you have to support this? Women are still underpaid compared to their male counterparts for doing the exact same work, which SCOTUS recently ruled was perfectly legal.
Women are still underrepresented in managerial and executive roles across the Fortune 500 and beyond, and have only begun making real gains in high-level US gov positions.
How exactly is the increasing rate of women in university contributing to the problem of poorly-educated white men committing suicide at a higher rate?
This article is about how male suicide is on the rise in the US. That is evidence. I also linked to male incarceration rates vs. female.
> Women are still underpaid compared to their male counterparts for doing the exact same work
This is simply not true and I challenge you to provide data to back up this assertion.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/karinagness/2016/04/12/dont-buy...
> How exactly is the increasing rate of women in university contributing to the problem of poorly-educated white men committing suicide at a higher rate?
Do you think they are totally unconnected? Is it not worth examining? Do you think male suicide and incarceration rates are even a problem worth looking into?
This article is about how suicide among various groups is falling, and it mentions as a counterpoint the rise in suicides by "white, middle-aged, poorly educated men in areas that were left behind by booms and crushed by busts". Nowhere in the article is it implied that male suicide is on the rise in the US as a result of the power women have over men in society.
For that matter, you haven't proven that the increase in proportional incarcerations of males versus females is due to the power women have over men in society (vis a vis, I assume, the legal system) either, rather than men committing more crimes than women.
If you're going to challenge others to back up their assertions at least back up your own.
>. At no point did I suggest that women have power over men.
"Is there a point where we collectively step back and acknowledge the great gains women have had in society; so great that they now have a very real advantage over men?"
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3686998/
Edit: Maybe downvoters might like to say why. Thanks.
It's not mentioning the problem that's the issue, it's your framing: you discuss the progress of men and women as though it is a zero-sum game: as though the increasing standards of respect, pay, and social options for women must imply a decrease of these things for men. This is (to put it mildly) mistaken. Obviously men in our society have many problems that are unique to men. But these problems are not being exacerbated by the progression of women's rights.
>As we know, there's a never ending effort to get women into stem, to empower girls, to elevate women in society.
Yes, and this benefits more than just women. Moving society away from rigid gender roles helps ensure that both men and women will not find themselves desperate and trapped because of their inability to satisfy the demands of their gender role.
There's a reason feminists complain about "patriarchy" instead of "men". Patriarchy is a social system, not specific people. The people aren't the problem, the system is. And as evidenced by the increasing suicide rate, patriarchy hurts men too. So maybe you prefer to emphasize concern about a different aspect of patriarchy than someone else, but it's absurd to think that they are therefore working against you.
Suicide is a huge problem and very complex topic and this article answers to "Why" are quite flippant.
Folks let’s get back back on tech and leave the politics to those with time for unproductive discussion.
> "Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did."
Similarly, "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
I suspect the downvotes for your parent are in response to them thinking the comment isn't in line with the guidelines. Commenting as they did often attracts attention to the comment and leads to worse discussion.