Suicide now leading cause of death among children aged 10 to 14 in Japan | Hacker News Reader

Suicide now leading cause of death among children aged 10 to 14 in Japan

japantimes.co.jp

51 pointsUltramanoid20 comments

> A recent trend in Japan in which suicides by children surge just after holidays, such as the spring and summer vacations, has become a major social issue.

Back to school. Bullying in Japan is a real everyday issue for many kids, can be extremely cruel, and a very common problem, despite recent attempts to curb it.

Anecdotally after holidays a girl who commutes by train thst i know. Jumped of a bridge (survived and unfortunately lost leg). It happened right after winter holidays. It shocked me to this day.

What this article is missing is the cultural significance of suicide in Japan. There are suicide clubs!

My observation is the most suicide discussion has greatly reduced suicide to the point that there isn't a discussion.

On Quora I once explained to a perplexed Chinese poster that our culture aims to avoid suicide and views it as a non-option, as she didn't understand why the other people were ignoring her obvious easier solution to what she considered undesirable failure.

"Suicide is to be prevented" doesn't address different cultures, and it barely addresses what people go through in the west, because people don't talk about it and don't want to. Lots of people want to talk you out of it and explain how it affects other people, nobody addresses the underlying issue or dead-ends people run into.

I would say the counterproductive nature of this messaging is - by definition - making it clearer that suicide is a viable option. So if we want to actually prevent suicide, we have to go deeper and give people purpose if their underlying issue can't be addressed.

Well, thats kind of a good thing, right? - They probably made everything safe. - They probably made everyone healthy through good diet, hygiene, medical care etc.

So whats left? Isn't suicide an acceptable way to die in Japan?

found the optimistic

I had to read your comment like 4 times to get what you're trying to say - you mean that there's so little chance of dying from something else (violence, disease, etc) that something that's really difficult to control and relatively rare is the most common cause of death (suicide), right?

Yup!

TFA doesn't provide enough information to know whether the suicide rate is unusually high, or other causes are unusually low. What it says about causes of death for children aged 10 to 14:

suicide: 22.9%

cancer: 22.7%

accidents: 11.7%

In the US, the major causes of death among children and adolescents are motor vehicle crashes and firearm injuries, and then cancers.[0] So maybe, with somewhat less motor vehicles and far less firearms, the suicide rate in Japan is unusual.

Maybe a Japanese speaker could find the actual data.

0) https://sci-hub.tw/10.1056/NEJMsr1804754

I'd be very suspicious of the 'accidents' section and would like to see detailed data about it myself.

Many people run over by trains ( to mention a relatively common occurrence in Tokyo ) are put in the 'accidents' statistic chart as well, even when it is no such thing in some cases, but a clear, deliberate suicidal act. I speak from personal experience, and not just once. For many reasons, even though it's obvious for everyone and there might even be witnesses to the event, better to avoid the stigma.

Likewise in Real Estate companies having to disclose such events in their properties. Much easier to deal with an 'accident' than a 'suicide' in an otherwise perfectly good apartment.

The issue is probably underreported in every demographic, children and pre-teens included.

I suspect that many motor vehicle and firearms "accidents" are actually suicides. Maybe not overt, but in a "death wish" sense. I was like that a lot in my teens and 20s. And even more recently, while I was taking SSRIs.

From what I have read, suicide is an issue for high school students in Japan due to extreme performance pressure.

As I understand it, they have 220 school days per year versus 180 in the US and they are expected to join study groups and the like "voluntarily," which de facto eats up a lot of their remaining free time.

I think the most charitable read it can be given is that a densely populated island nation has innate performance pressure. If you don't creatively squeeze every drop from the local resources, you face a population collapse. The high pressure culture is a attempt to mitigate those things.

I do get your point and I didn't downvote you. But I think you are probably missing this piece of the puzzle.

But this doesn't explain it all. China and Korea has the same extreme amount of school pressure on its children, but their suicide rates don't match up. Bullying and racism is also blatant in Korea, also overlong work hours. It must be correlated more to the stricter society rules there. It's also a much older society than the other two.

South korea has a high suicide-rate. It's the 10th highest in the world, 20 places above japan. According to wikipedia[0] suicide among children seems to be even higher than in japan. Though im not sure whether both compare the same context of numbers.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_South_Korea#/media/...

I wasn't pretending to explain it all. I was merely saying that it isn't as simple as "It's all good news -- it's a leading cause of death because it's a utopian ideal where everything else has been largely solved."

I know very little about it and I'm aware of this element of pressure contributing to the high suicide rate for teens. So it's no doubt more complicated.

Doubt you'd get real data on suicides from China. Everything is perfect there.

TLDR as stated in the title and we don't have a single clue why.

And it sounds like they only want to detect it early to prevent it and don't even look for a root cause to tackle...

Why is this on hacker news?

Well, there’s a fair amount of startups working on mental health, and this illustrates there is a real human problem to solve versus another food delivery app. Also, maybe someone who is data driven and motivated could try to more deeply analyze the data?

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