Suicide Rates Among Adolescents and Young Adults in the United States, 2000-2017
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I went to a "college prep" high school that was harder than my college. As I became independent, I realized that intense academics stole my childhood and didn't have the value that the adults believe they have.
At the same time, when I lived in Palo Alto, I used to hear about how one of the high schools, (Gunn?) had a very high suicide rate due to the stress of academics. Someone (Caltrans?) put fences around the train tracks to try and stop suicides.
(I wish commenters wouldn't immediately blame social media.)
My high school was horribly inefficient, in other words, which ended up being stressful. I gather this is the norm. Meanwhile adults were telling me those were the best years of my life—I mean I wasn't really bullied and had a pretty decent high school experience and now that I'm older I sorta get what they meant but god damn, if that'd actually been true I should have offed myself. The "real world", and college, are easier than high school, which was difficult mostly because it was both hyper-authoritarian and wasted phenomenal amounts of time.
I'd suggest based on empirical evidence most people in the tech world are more apt to flower later. So for some, their peak was at high school or college - for most of us, I suspect its early to mid thirties.
So, all, told, I was working _80 hours a week, minimum_ in my high school years. I graduated top ten in my class, and my parents were astonished that I took two years off between high school and college going to a technical school eight hours a week with a 40 hour a week job. I had cut 32 hours of work a week out of my week, and I was only 19!
When I finally did go to college, the weeks during the semester were about twenty hours a week between classes, studying, projects, and tutoring and a twenty hour a week part time job. I can understand why you felt like college was a vacation because I felt the same way!
The downside to all of this is that I was very poorly socialized, compared to some of my peers, when I started college. Luckily, since I had a bunch of free time, it was easy to catch up, but the first semester was difficult for me navigating all of these unstructured, unsupervised socialization opportunities. A part of me regrets that because that stunted my ability to network from the start of college - I have no idea what opportunities I have missed out on and will miss out on in the future as a result.
Several people that graduated in that top ten with me who had the same 80 hour a week work week in high school could not handle the unstructured free time in college. Two dropped out of college but have none-the-less worked their way into lives that seem to make them happy, one got heavily into drugs and is still in jail, one committed suicide, and the rest graduated and seem to have kept on the track.
The obvious question is whether weedout regimens actually burnish skills. In my experience they did to some extent, but most of the effort expended was game-playing to get onto a path which would be easier or more lucrative in the long run. (Example: becoming a medical doctor or tenured professor is harder than it has to be because people are attracted by the prospect of a job-for-life.)
It's pretty frustrating to bust your hump in high school to get a leg up on college work and then be stuck in the same class as the mouth breathers who just coasted by in high school and completely bored.
But yeah, coulda CLEP'd out of at least a year of college if I'd known better. No-one told me that and I didn't figure it out until it was too late. Never even occurred to me that I could knock out all those credit hours on the cheap with some very, very light studying over a summer. I mean college is supposed to be really hard, right, otherwise what's the point? eyeroll
This is one of most baffling aspects about the US, that is that you can have classrooms with no windows. I didn’t personally grow up as a kid in the best social-economic regime (an Eastern-European communist country in the ‘80s) but fortunately for little kid me the regime’s architects and urban planners put great emphasis on all classrooms having lots of windows, as big as possible. I later in my life became quite interested in the history of architecture and urban planning and I was able to find this idea (i.e. big windows are good for schools) in architectural magazines published way back in the 1950s.
I suspect that's a natural consequence of good people being held down in poverty by tyrannical government.
My view on social media and parents giving smartphones to kids is the primary reason. When kids start overusing phones and digital world, everything seems binary, they can feel like they can control people in real-world as if thy do a 3d character in their latest game. And can get depressed when others don't behave as they intend to. A friend becomes a removable entity in a list or circle(google+) they can add or pluck out anytime, without considering the emotional factor others feel. I can talk on this topic whole day, i believe kids don'e need smartphones etc. and I will never bring my kids near them at-least till they reach their teen years.
I've talked to Canadian kids who, when caught using steroids, have said that their performance on the field was part of their entrance plan. They had consciously decided to take drugs not to become pro athletes, or even to win a scholarship, but simply to get into a proper university. Similarly, I haven't heard of many indian students taking "learning drugs". I heard an ivy league admissions person talk about the sports thing. She spoke of a boarderline case involving an athlete who had competed at the Olympics. He had failed to medal. THAT was part of the schools decision, whether they metaled or not actually mattered.
For people who burn out in high school, that's usually your first experience with it. The first time is always the worst, whether it happens in high school, college, or on the job.
Once you've already burned out once in high school, twice in college (once before and once after switching your major), and hit your breaking point at a job or two (regardless of whether you switch jobs, or careers, or just take a long vacation, or just spend six months kind of just putting in time at your job before you're ready to really try again) ... well, burning out still sucks, but you kind of get used to it, you know how to deal with it, and you know that eventually you're going to pick yourself up again.
But man, that first time, you really feel like a failure, like you're never going to amount to anything, and like you'll never be able to try again.
Of course even then it's a total crapshoot, but there's very little chance of that panning out in the state school.
Can you please point out the schools giving away A’s? My high school and the colleges I attended were certainly not that way. Not even remotely. I’m going to get a masters soon and I want to go to this type of school.
There are hundreds of millions of people around the world who's parents are spending their life savings to send them to a broken down public school, and anything short of an A+ means abject poverty (I mean real poverty, not the American "I can't afford my iPhone bill poverty") for another generation of their family name. My dad is the only person in his small shanty town who made it out, and he studied 16 hours a day, 7 days a week - all to achieve a decent middle class salary and drive a Toyota Camry. I was an exceptionally gifted student thanks to him, graduated at the top of my class, and now, again, barely eek out a middle class life
Not to mention the societal aspect - in many Asian cultures anything short of an A and you're an abject societal failure and a generational disgrace. Western-raised people don't have a clue what that kind of pressure feels like.
Anyone who thinks American schools are stressful are completely delusional about how the rest of the world works. Americans have had life too easy for too long - depression is simply a symptom of an overly easy life. It's the same reason depression & mental health issues overly present in zoo animals.
Suffering and struggle are necessary for a fulfilling, happy life - the West hasn't been exposed to real suffering in over half a century.
That sounds more like pain, not stress. If you (or the you at the time, which is an important difference) can easily externalize your problem—i.e. blame the school for being stupidly strict, rather than blame yourself for not living up to its standard—then as much as it might be an ordeal to go through, it won’t really affect your psyche.
The concern here isn’t that school is harder; the concern is that school (and the way parents talk to children about school) is being treated with more seriousness than it deserves, and so the potential of failure at school is being seen—at least on average—as more of a personal, moral failing, an automatic source of shame.
Of course, children always treated some school environments this way—mostly high-cost private schools, intensely-competitive academic schools, and military academies. But this attitude seems to be spreading to all schools, and that’s a bit concerning.
One person's suffering doesn't diminish or invalidate the suffering of someone else.
It's actually hilarious to me that you think this could possibly be true.
And to be clear, we're talking about an educated person with a relatively successful life. But the expectation that real life follows "Hollywood" is still there. I started to doubt that everybody is able to draw a clear line between reality and fiction as long as they bask in that fiction for too long or at key moments in life.
Reducing access to means and methods is the best way prevent suicide, and that includes physical security around frequently used locations, especially if they involve trains or high places.
There's often a strong resistance to this and I don't understand why.
See this rather old English government advice: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
(See in particular case study 2 and case study 3 on pages 22 and 25)
There's often a strong resistance to
this and I don't understand why.
[0] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nyu-bobst-library-suicides-al...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWPEVhrWZS0
Start at 6:50 for reducing access to means and methods.
It's a very important part, and you must have reducing access to means and methods if you want to reduce the numbers of people killing themselves.
With that in mind, I can easily see how things like fences might make the problem worse as you said. People will feel even more trapped and helpless when what they need is the opposite.
When you introduce business-like accountability, you need a way to “stack rank” your resources. This process alone is misguided — not all public schools have the same mission, so whatever criteria you come up with removes control of that mission from the local level — and has a lot of second-order consequences.
Even in business, all this heavy measurement and reporting causes a ton of overhead — and in schools, this takes the form of standardized testing. This causes a lot of schools to abandon their primary mission — educating students — to pursue a mission of improving standardized test scores by X%. Test prep is hammered home with mountains of homework so teachers don’t get dinged for not challenging students enough.
Using business-like incentives (the best-run schools get more budget) is counterintuitive in education: the worst schools need more support, not less. Closing down a low-performing school furthers the goal of meeting the metrics, but often not the goal of educating students. A lot of attention is paid to the impact of this in low-performing schools, but when you give high-performing schools bigger budgets, they just pile more work on the kids as parents apply pressure for intense college prep.
So you end up with 2 kinds of schools: one that provides basic services focused on test metrics to keep the little funding they have, and another that has test scores covered through demographic advantages and focuses on college prep because the parents are better educated and more involved in their kids’ lives. Kids are stressed out in both schools — instability and violence in the former, massive expectations and workloads in the latter. But I think the cause is the same: by forcing our kids to operate in a business-like environment, they end up looking a lot like the stressed-out employees of big companies.
What do we really have to look forward to?
More extreme weather, less water, more migration from countries where people have it worse than you, rise in political parties suggesting protectionism and anti-immigrant policies to combat the above, lower quality goods that don't last as long as people chase that margin down, less interesting and interest in art as people lack the spare time to come up with anything remotely non-mainstream, increasingly censored internet, rise in "tropical" diseases such as dengue fever & ebola in non-tropical countries due to climate change, more religion, more random civilian deaths at the hands of marginalised people and the police, people being prevented from travel/shop/work due to unchallengeable blacklisting by corporate CCTV networks with face/gait recognition resulting in homelessness.
Yep, there's a storm comin' alright.
The only solution I see to this is the richest 1% or so paying everyone else to have no children. It would sort out just about every problem in about 50 years. I don't see another solution.
Except for the whole "economic collapse" thing. See Japan.
That is part of the issue though. It wasn't that long ago that that was true of most people (90s is pushing it a bit, but before?).
These days a lot of people are DINK, and you're competing with those. So not only you have to index the salary for inflation, you have to consider that you're competing with people who don't have a bunch of kids, and whom's spouse also brings in a salary.
So (not a real calculation, but just to make a point) assume the spouse would make the same amount of money and the kids are taking half of it, the DINK equivalent of income available for housing is now inflation + 4x that.
If the norm back then was: 1 income, multiple kids.
Now you have - 1 income, 1 or more kids (essentially screwed) - 1 income, no kids - 2 incomes, 1 or more kids - 2 income, no kids (so far beyond the first case that the former can't come close to competing).
Its also why if you are in the later camp and something happens (you lose your job or get sick and get a divorce), you're completely fucked.
You can probably own a home if you want. You can travel the world if you want. You can meet a nice girl and cook food together in a cozy apartment. You can start brewing beer as a hobby with your friends. You can hike the Appalachian trail.
You can do a lot of things if you want.
The problem isn't that Chicago is going to become uninhabitable. The problem is that food supply for billions of people are going to be threatened, that will make the flood of refugees from Syria seem like a trickle.
It will also be a very gradual increase in temperature and we humans are very good at adapting and finding solutions.
Serious question: Have you ever lived in a country that was in the middle of a famine?
People 'find solutions' to that problem. They aren't pretty. Those solutions consist of 'rob', 'starve, or 'leave'.
If you live in the first world, your problem is going to be dealing with people who are taking option #3. We're barely capable of dealing with a flow of refugees from one or two countries.
Besides, I have to compete with people on welfare who have a lot more time to chase girls than I do as the person paying for their welfare.
Basically it's a mix between boomers not selling, and millennial's not wanting what they are selling (because what they are selling is shit). When we bought our home, we were looking at old (built in 1940's) starter homes in the 200k to 250k range and it was a nightmare. Anything that was great was out of our price range, and anything decent to 'ok' would be sold in the first 24 hours. Most of the stuff that wasn't selling was just straight garbage - stuff that would require a lot of work and money (50k minimum) to get moved into the 'decent' category.
There are plenty of new houses being built, but you have to go an hour or an hour and half outside the city. I have a family member and friend who went this route and they love it, but that obviously leads to long commutes and other downsides.
[1]: https://www.chicagotribune.com/real-estate/ct-re-millennial-...
"I can't afford to do the thing I want to do most."
"Then do something else."
If jobs in Toronto aren't paying enough to live there, move. Find a job making less money in a place where you can actually afford to live. I understand you may want the lifestyle afforded by being in a big city, but you're not owed that experience.
The answer is to flee these places, move on to greener pastures, these are barren.
Perhaps we should be thankful so many people are unaware of the cities between the coasts, more people might come here and wreck it!
With all due respect, this sounds like complete horseshit. How much are you paying for rent?
"Reported Average Starting Salary" for a mechanical engineer in 1995 was $35,744, or $55,189 adjusted to 2015 (https://www.naceweb.org/job-market/compensation/salary-trend...). Federal taxes on that are about $8,078 (https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040tt.pdf); let's double that to account for state and local taxes; $39,033 net after taxes, or $3,253/month.
Average rent in Seattle is $1,965 (https://www.rentcafe.com/average-rent-market-trends/us/wa/se...), but many neighborhoods are lower and more in tune with upstate New York (and "20 miles outside" is anywhere between Everett, Snoqualmie, or nearly to Tacoma); let's split the difference at $1,600. That leaves $1,653/month. Call it $53 for ramen and beer one night a month (that's a lot of ramen and beer) and there's $1,600 for everything else.
> I'm in the same spot I grew up with my grandparents in, barely making it with like an extra $40/mo for ramen & beer with a friend or two one night for entertainment. No debt. It's such a common story among my similarly aged friends too.
A $35,000 car loan, 60 mos, 5%, is about $660/mo (https://www.bankrate.com/loans/auto-loans/current-auto-loan-... average student loan debt is $38,390 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_debt), 120 mos (https://www.consumerfinance.gov/ask-cfpb/how-long-does-it-ta...), 8% (https://www.valuepenguin.com/student-loans/student-loan-inte...) is about $466/mo. That totals to $1,126, leaving only $474 for vegetables and stuff.
A lot of what I’ll call “third tier” cities (Cleveland, Boise, Reno, etc.) are facing housing shortages precisely because a lot of people were priced out of larger cities. So housing shortages are popping up in those places as well, driving up home prices dramatically. I know at least one of those cities where the average price of a 2br house jumped from $300k to $600k in 5 years.
As usual, the problems are NIMBYs and restrictive zoning with a heavy preference for single-family homes. But moving to smaller, cheaper cities is only a short-term solution. The long-term solution is to build more, denser housing.
Reno's listing price $231/ft^2 up from $151/ft^2 five years ago, but keep in mind that Reno was rather badly hit by 2008: median sales prices for 2br homes peaked at about $284,000 in 2006, bottomed at about $75,000 in 2011, and are currently back up to $271,000 (https://www.trulia.com/real_estate/Reno-Nevada/market-trends...).
It’s a problem that will get worse before it gets better, and the cities that can figure out how to provide housing that someone working minimum wage can afford will be the winners.
Putting up fences next to train tracks won't do much for the former, but I suspect it will reduce the frequency of the latter (which it did, in this case).
It reduced the frequency of "suicide by train". But suicides overall went up 30% from what the article states. It's more likely that the people who could no longer use this method as a spur of the moment thing just chose something else. Transportation related suicide accounts for 0.4% (or ~170 in 2012) of suicides in the US. [0] "Fall", another spur of the moment method, accounts for 6 times as much. You can only build so many fences.
As someone with a bit of experience on the topic I can tell you that when suicidal ideation reaches the tipping point you need more than a fence to stop them.
But I'm not saying "don't put up the fence". I just found GP's remark that "The fences and guards have absolutely helped" either a bit cynical or unrealistically optimistic. The only thing we can say with certainty is that it helped keep the trains going. I'm not sure it definitively saved lives. For that we need to do a lot more than build a fence...
[0] http://lostallhope.com/suicide-statistics/us-methods-suicide
Things effective one place, are less effective in others because of "sociocultural" reasons [0], but there is some evidence to suggest denying people access to the tools to commit suicide, and reducing media coverage (social contagion/clustering) seem to help.
With that said, yes, you are right, just changing one thing doesn't do much, there needs to be a bigger picture approach that addresses many factors.
Exactly right. We put people on the moon and we did it without grinding 8 year olds with hours and hours of homework.
These parents are absolutely relentless on their kids. It's a really sad expression of 'keep up with Joneses'.
Really? Do you mean that typical NASA engineers, astronauts, and other hard-working and gifted people involved in the Great Space Race, typically were not intensely trained, but just had all childhood time full of playing?
Recently, in Colorado Springs, CO, a teen suicide cluster was allowed to fester for a number of years in the evangelical community. The coroner, respecting the religious wishes of the bereaved, listed the teen suicudes not as suicides per se, and these victims were not included in official stats. The religious community believed that death was not the end and that the victims would live on in heaven. The victim would be lionized and become the 'most popular kid in school' for a while. Finally, the memorialization of the victims was wide spread via social media and the religious community, and was also very public with lots of people attending funerals. The combination of these factors allowed the suicide rate to spike 4900% there [1,2].
Though stress is undoubtably a trigger for suicide, it seems that suicide is very complicated and individual, despite the cluster nature of it. More research has been helpful in preventing this horrible 'disease' from spreading further, and awareness of the issue is being increasingly taught to our youth.
If anyone reading this is feeling suicidal, please reach out! In addition to the hotlines (1-800-273-8255), I would like to personally help you. Let me know a good email address and we can talk offline. I really, honestly, do want to help you.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-sil...
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/2016/10/28/teen-suicide-contagious-...
[2] https://gazette.com/education/teen-suicides-spike-in-el-paso...
I'm not saying that they are faking it, and I know their lives look significantly shittier than mine at their age and the future looks bleak for most, but I have a theory that when it becomes viral some people try to act depressed and end up being depressed for real. Like, when I was adolescent I knew a lot of girls with eating disorders (bulimia/anorexia) in my immediate circle (before social media) but I don't think I know anybody with those problems today, because having those issues became uncool, now you have others to pick from.
So yes, what I'm trying to say is that I had paralyzing social anxiety before it was cool.
They were the primary bullies growing up? That's where I got the idea, at least. And suffering seems like a more authentic emotion than happiness, as there are all sorts of heavy social incentives to constantly project happiness. There's a lot more people out there faking happiness, than there are faking suffering.
I proclaim that justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger
Can you not downplay this? Some people might have a mild variation of a disorder but many, like myself, suffer deeply.
It could be a self fulfilling prophecy for some and if you add internet where a lot of people tend to make their diagnosis their whole life. My guess is that if you are feeling depressed it can be very comforting to talk with other people in the same state but I'm not sure how healthy it is in the long run if you spend a lot of time in such communities.
That said I think it is also a rougher way to grow up in many ways than it was for me. Your life might be hyper connected but I think for some that will only suck more when they are lonely outcasts and see everyone else's (appearance of) happy life on Instagram.
I don't think you are, but I'm wondering how this antidote comment is useful in a thread about suicide.
But, again, I'm a dumb happy adult that once almost jump in front of a bus because I was a dumb heart-broken twenty something. I know nothing.
I think this has always been the case. Isn't this what being emo, metal, punk, etc. was about in the early 2000s, 90s and 80s? Calling for attention is common at that age, and with so many and so intense feelings as one feels during teenage years, I have always assumed this is common.
> Kids "brag" about it on social media and sometimes discuss who is more miserable and make fun on people who are "wholesome" or "happy" as being shallow.
This sounds like punk subculture. And really a lot of other sub and counter-cultures. IMO this is also healthy. In the context of college I know people who went to schools where, they told me, the overarching social dynamic was "showing a put-together facade". They said this was very stressing. Not only would you struggle, but on top of that you'd have to hide it.
I went to a college where the overarching social dynamic was to complain and talk about how miserable we were, how much work we had, how stressed we all were, etc. It is very refreshing to not have to pretend you've got everything under control and to know that other people are struggling in the same way you are.
On that note, IMO it's worth having a look at wether it is in the other side of the coin that this problem resides— those "wholesome" kids. Especially in some areas of the US, kids are under immense amounts of pressure. Many times the people you'd less think are at risk of committing suicide are the ones who do [1].
It makes sense. If the middle-class keeps disappearing, this becomes an all-or-nothing game. Getting into a good college to study a lucrative career can sound like a ticket to a drastically better life. In the US you hear the word "success" a lot. If everyone around you is a high achiever in one monoculture, not fitting into that monoculture or not achieving the same things your community has can make you feel alone and inadequate. Here are some quotes from that article I linked [1]:
> A goofy basketball player with short brown hair and a pixie face, Cam, as he was known to friends, was the last kid anyone would have suspected of being troubled. His classmates describe him as having been happy, nonchalant, and popular, and that’s exactly how he appears in the homecoming photos posted on so many Facebook pages before his death: a handsome, grinning kid, standing smack in the center of his clique. “If you told me that someone in my friend group would commit suicide, he would be my straight-up last guess,” says Lisa Hao.
> “There’s no middle point for success. There’s no ‘I’m here and I’m happy with where I am.’ It’s always ‘I need to be up there,’” she says. The kids paint a picture of a sort of academic coliseum, where students look down their noses at peers in a lower math “lane,” guard their grade point averages like state secrets, brag about 2 a.m. cramming sessions, and consider a B a disaster.
> “Because we live in this extraordinary place that really has some singular qualities,” says Ken Dauber, a Palo Alto father and a member of the school board, “we think somehow that our kids are also singular and extraordinary. But they are just kids.”
[1]: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Why-are-Palo-Alto-s-k...
This mentality that success and maturity and health are evil is societal suicide.
It's a devil's bargain, because being at the receiving end of virtue signals is actually pretty worthless, unless maybe you get to be a diversity hire. However, if you foster a victim identity you will underachieve because you will blame everything and everyone but yourself when things go wrong.
In the past, males in particular would be told in no unclear terms that pretty much nobody cares to hear about their problems and that they need to sort themselves out as part of becoming adults.
Today, they'll be given pills and a consultation with therapists whose education is probably nonsense.
Not only do you not fit in, but you're not allowed to complain about anything/say anything, your problems don't matter, etc.
Which is pretty problematic for people who have issues that aren't in the "approved list of things that currently matter".
Basically, if you think will power is a limited resource, people will use that as an excuse to give up.
One of my fellow graduate students failed 2 out of 3 classes last semester. He's repeated that will power is finite several times, ignoring me when I mention research suggesting otherwise. It's just too convenient of an excuse for him to say it was beyond his control, he had no choice but to play board games all day instead of studying and doing homework.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09567976103847...
Psychology studies tend to be marred by the "piranha problem": you can't have a bunch of large effects determining behavior, without them eating each other.[1] We're immensely complicated, and make highly individual and nuanced decisions. There's just too much noise to try and boil things down to small patterns from simple studies.
I believe (perhaps grounded weakly in largely anecdotal evidence) that people need to be able to fit their own behavior in some sort of personal narrative, or justify it in some way. Therefore, that the belief they "can't help" but do something they want to do (whether that be procrastinate or eat unhealthy food) will make it easier to justify, and thus the behaviors more likely. But there are as many different internal narratives, built on life experiences, as there are people. Making it hard to generalize surface level consequences between people.
[1] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2017/12/15/piranha-pr...
I guess even Nobel laureates aren't immune to the replication crisis...
> The nineteenth century French pioneer sociologist Émile Durkheim borrowed the word from French philosopher Jean-Marie Guyau and used it in his influential book Suicide (1897), outlining the social (and not individual) causes of suicide, characterized by a rapid change of the standards or values of societies (often erroneously referred to as normlessness), and an associated feeling of alienation and purposelessness. He believed that anomie is common when the surrounding society has undergone significant changes in its economic fortunes, whether for better or for worse and, more generally, when there is a significant discrepancy between the ideological theories and values commonly professed and what was actually achievable in everyday life. This was contrary to previous theories on suicide which generally maintained that suicide was precipitated by negative events in a person's life and their subsequent depression.
Just look at when this took off: right after 2008, when any notion that they'd be taken care of and their futures were secure was swept away. The adolescents who came of age during that event will probably spend the rest of their lives with lingering economic insecurity and fear about the future.
It is well known that antidepressants increase the risk of suicide for children, teenagers and young adults (i.e. people under 25). The FDA has acknowledged this and even put warnings on the drug packaging. Yet antidepressants are still routinely prescribed for children and teenagers.
This is something the media does not like to talk about considering how pharma companies spend a lot of money on advertising. But it is a very important possible factor and it should be considered.
Opiates were marketed as sleeping aid for babies.
Synthetic opiates, such as tramadol were marketed not to be addictive that turned out to be a lie.
Many medications were taken of the market due to side effects, and often the pharmaceutical company knew and downplayed the side effects.
Anti-depressants were also supposed to be safe and non addicting, but withdrawals are actually insane.
I have been nearly crippled by an antibiotic and again side effects are downplayed, and FDA is updating the label year after year adding more and more side effects and not recommending the medication as first line treatment anymore.
For example as a teenager, I desperately needed accutane. Other solutions weren't working and some had actually more severe side effects than accutane; one tetracycline gave me heartburn so severe I basically couldn't eat anything, whereas the most accutane did was dry out my skin.
But because of studies that found a link to increased rates of depression/suicide among people taking accutane, it took years for me to work my way up to taking it, with very bad damage to my self esteem over that time. And if you look up the studies that promote this link, they are obviously not properly controlled, because they compare accutane users to the general population, and not to a subpopulation that has acne bad enough to need accutane. Which is dumb because lots of people (like me) who were taking accutane already had depression not because of the medicine, but in part due to very low self esteem and social ostracization due to the acne that was bad enough to warrant taking that drug.
So the symptom they were trying to prevent was something I already had, and withholding the drug because of concerns about that symptom contributed to making the symptom even worse for me.
There's definitely a fine line to walk between effective treatment and harm reduction when it comes to that class of medication.
Sorry to hear about your experience. I hope things are better now.
Yes, but I feel that these days, at least on the internet, speaking with skepticism about medicine and pharma companies will have people equating you with anti-vaxxers, given the arguments are often similar
> The conspiracists takes a dogmatic stance
What, all of them? And who are the "conspiracists"? Those who disbelieve the 9/11 myth, who question the long-term health effects of drugging water systems, who question the safety of wireless transmitters installed in every cubic inch of the world, who see through war propaganda and manufactured history? There are a thousand more "trigger topics".
All of these people are the same, huh? Dogmatic dolts who can't do research? Dummies who don't accept official narratives simply because they're trouble-makers?
The power system maintains its stranglehold over the population because our implicit slavery has been normalized. Is there any earthly reason why we should have billionaires next to people starving to death? We accept this because it has been normalized. There has always been a war on information, but we finally have the means to take back control. But in order to do so, we have to want it.
The largest source of trauma in the country right now is school gun violence. The gun control movement being led by the traumatized victims of gun violence, regardless of it's ultimate effectiveness, is the healthiest response to trauma I've seen in the US. It took suburban middle class children access to therapists, to start moving that conversation towards a place of sanity. If their pain never subsists, what kind of adults do you think they'll be?
Antidepressants worked very well for my S.O. for a stretch of their life. The long term benefit is not so clear, but they have clearly helped. With me, they made everything worse.
This all comes down to how we value/price medical labor in my opinion. More extensive conversations, bringing mental health experts with proven track records into the loop, more custom tailored medication approaches-- all of these things are needed to get a better grasp of the overall societal problem and how best to deal with it.
I think its a damn shame where the conversation on depression is going. Depression is tested and diagnosed by a questionnaire (presumably well-designed, with redundancies to make it robust). Antidepressants are serotonin reuptake inhibitors, a drug inspired by a monoamine hypothesis now discarded. We still prescribe them because they modestly lower the score on an observer rating scale better than placebo. If you take an SSRI, it should be bioavailable instantly! Why does depression take months to recover from?
With this all said, all severely depressed people should get medical treatment; moderately depressed people should consider trying it. I also don't want to strawman medicine, science or psychiatry, and claim that they think we are serotonin vessels. They acknowledge all the stuff I said above. I just don't know if its communicated to the layman or the media, especially when we see horrendous, exponentially growing rates like this.
The thing is mood and motivation are shockingly separate and antidepressants are a "try and see what fits". So if it combos to improved motivation while still feeling suicidal that is a bad combination.
As for the why biochemically it not certain but it involves longer cycles.
Ketamine is one faster acting hope but it isn't widely used from other concerns.
The period of initial antidepressant use and its associated up-regulation of receptors can increase activation, anxiety and akathisia, a feeling of intense physical discomfort and restlessness, with many people finding the anxiety and akathisia to be inescapable. One receptor associated with this is the 5HT2C subtype, which is not a targeted receptor, but still is activated as a side-effect of SSRI therapy.
It's hypothesized that people might harm themselves in order to decrease or escape the discomfort they feel while beginning antidepressants. Another hypothesis is that the anxiety and activation might drive someone who is struggling with suicidal thoughts to act upon them before the antidepressant's therapeutic effects kick in.
One of the reasons Prozac is approved for minors is 1) it has an extremely long half-life such that a missed dosed isn't the end of the world and 2) it antagonizes the 5HT2C receptor site, theoretically minimizing activation, anxiety and akathisia associated with starting an antidepressant regimen.
Add to that: - Obesity and its impact on sleep quality (eg: a LOT of people with undiagnosed sleep apnea, which can have depression-like symptoms)
- Nutritional deficiencies (big lack of reliable info around this so its hard to figure out whats real and whats not, but shit like lacking magnesium supposedly can have consequences in this area?).
All around, lots of stuff can lead to depression, suicide, etc, beyond "the world sucks".
There is a clear curve upward in the 15-24 and to a lesser degree the 25-34 group starting in 2013. I don't think there was a big economic downswing at the time, so it could be other cultural or technological factors at play.
My theory is that they can't attribute issues in their life to things like racism/discrimination, so they perceive failures in their own life as their own fault rather than the fault of a racist society. That also seems to fit with suicides dropping during the world wars, when there is something else which you can blame for your problems, suicide rates are lower. I have nothing to back this up though so idk but it makes sense to me, blaming someone else for your situation is a common way to make yourself feel better about it (and is reasonable in many cases I think, there are lots of things you can't control which contribute to failures in your life).
White americans have been told as kids that if you go to college, and then work hard, you'll be rewarded with a good life. This generation of people are finding this to be a con. Look at the lack of wage increases since the 70s even though productivity has increased a lot or look at the student debt crisis for some proof that it was.
Minorities, on the otherhand, were never taught to believe in the American dream, because they haven't really had it in the past.
Now that white people are figuring out it was a myth, and that they are going to likely end up with a worse life then their parents they are commiting suicide, commiting mass shootings, etc.
Here's the article. There's some stuff in there I'm not so sure about it, but I think the general idea has some merit. https://www.truthdig.com/articles/american-anomie/
> White americans have been told as kids that if you go to college, and then work hard, you'll be rewarded with a good life.
People should add an addendum that you need to think about what kind of job you are going to get after you graduate, and it's still kind of true. I know people who thought like this, not at all exclusively white people, and those people are at this stage of their lives (early-mid 20s) seemingly a lot less happy than people who actually thought about their potential careers before they turned 22.
>DUBNER: The most compelling explanation of suicide I’ve ever heard about — discussed with the fellow who promulgates it — because we don’t really know that much about suicide, because it’s taboo, the research is very distant and so on. But he calls it the “no-one-left-to-blame” theory. Which is that if you have problems in life, but you’ve got a toxic environment or a nasty government, you can always imagine that life will get a lot better. But if you’re surrounded by happy, shiny people and you’re not happy and shiny, it can be — so can you talk about that notion in a place that’s so happy?
WIKING: Yeah. So there is a term, “the happiness-suicide paradox,” that talks about exactly that — that it might be more difficult to be unhappy in an otherwise happy society. If everybody around you feels that life is great, that are oh-so-happy, and you yourself feel unhappy, then that could create a stronger contrast and maybe you start to blame yourself. And more developed countries have reduced the reasons why we should be unhappy. You know, eliminate poverty, have eliminated lack of education — then if I have all these opportunities, why am I still unhappy? We start to internalize that cause and blame ourselves.
White: 38%
Native American: 31%
Asian/Pacific Islander: 16%
Black/African American: 15%
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_Unit...
No, the population share has already been taken into account. You may have mistaken those numbers to be percentages of total suicides and then compared them to percentages of the population. They aren't, they are deaths by suicide per 100,000 people. You don't need to know anything about the sizes of the groups involved to compare those numbers, and the rate doesn't change. 100 suicides per million people is 10/100,000, just as 1000 per ten million or 10000 per one hundred million.
I'm sure that's not the whole story though. And statistics on suicides are notoriously unreliable, as many communities consider it shameful and are incentivized to rationalize the person's death with another explanation.
Maybe your saying that the perception of who caused the failure plays into the response to it. I would say that depression in the Black community has been normalized -- that is, no one is really talking about it, but the large part of folk that I've grown up with, the large number of ancestors that I've heard stories about, the ladies in my church who would start crying for no apparent reason, the people that I've known in several decades of being Black, these people are fighting through depression. We need to normalize the healing.
The numbers are here
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/images/databriefs/301-350/db303_fig...
The most poignant story I know of is that of Rosa Parks
https://www.shondaland.com/inspire/a16022001/rosa-parks-was-...
In other words, even though you may know the difficulties you're against are caused be a racist system (typically knowing that racism is really at play takes months, years, even a century to piece together), taking it on does not guarantee that you will be supported by the community, you are likely to be cast into the same conditions and isolation that exacerbate mental health crises.
I don't know of a more poignant indicator of "depression as a state of being" than our creation of Blues
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blues
"In lyrics the phrase is often used to describe a depressed mood."
The "work songs" were the songs of men re-enslaved in the mass incarceration programs of the early 20th century
The numbers also tell us that the leading cause of death of Black male teens is homicide.
https://www.cdc.gov/healthequity/lcod/men/2015/black/index.h...
How many of these deaths are being wrongly reported -- young men and boys seeking out the right combination of circumstances to be on the wrong side of a gun barrel? My personal experience and theory is that probing these deaths you would find the majority to be set in motion by a mental health crisis.
As I talked to older relatives and thought through the stories I'd hear as a child, they run rife with of undiagnosed mental health issues. Relatives who succumbed to suicide, people who simply decided to leave/disappear, people who suddenly went completely silent forever. The recurring theme you hear in those stories -- elaborate plans to defeat a segregated housing covenant that fell apart, a grown man being too many times being called "boy" -- people take this pain on themselves and the torment lasts generations.
What's even more interesting is how suicide rates go down during WW1 and WW2. Sebastian Junger spoke about this in his book "Tribe" where he cites lower psychological disorders in Great Britain at the height of V2 bombing which then increased again after the war. I think his thesis was war created an increased sense of camaraderie/solidarity and sense of purpose. It was a really interesting, quick read.
I have read about this trend in smaller societies. It has been implicated in the 80s/90s aids crisis in US black communities. A substantial percentage of 20-30yo black males were jailed during the drug war. Those males not in jail found dating far easier. Females had to compete for the artificially reduced number of males. This lead to reduced condom use, accelerating the heterosexual spread of aids in these communities. Also, a baby boom. Changing the male/female ratio in an extremely powerful driver of change.
I know that during the 19th century, Goethe's "The Sorrows Of Young Werther"[1] was reputed to have provoked a rash of suicides.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorrows_of_Young_Werther
In England the law changed in 1961, but coroners still had to use "beyond all reasonable doubt" to come to a conclusion of suicide until 2018. There was a case (Maughan) that changed the burden of proof to "balance of probabilities".
https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2019/809.html
https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Admin/2018/1955.html
In the US you have the added complexity of different laws for each state, with different standards that coroners work to. Getting coroners to work to common standards is notoriously difficult.
Just don't be creepy and respect women.
Please save me from the objectifying story, as both genders are gravely guilty of this (height requirements, demanding certain position and status from the men, very demanding list of character traits in general, all this while expecting appearance of someone professional like actors or celebrities).
I wholeheartedly support the notion that random girls on Tinder have no business being some random dude's therapist. But, the idea that crippling social anxiety is pretty much the same as being an objectyfing creep, and it's no wonder socially anxious people are single, is a bit cold.
I mean, both women and men suffer from relationship problems but men certainly commit suicide more. Discovering why that is, in a non-judgemental fashion, seems like a useful inquiry.
Tinder might be the wrong place for that.
Doing both of these and at best I'm friendzoned onto the Moon. Not working, sorry.
I've been where you are, and I suggest you consider that you're setting yourself up for failure through very poor internal monologue/narrative of what's going on. Dr. Nerd Love's videos [1] and blog on this and other related topics are highly recommended.
May also be worth considering school shootings and the psychological impact of "preventative" drills inducing fear of them.
meeting people today is much easier than it was 20 years ago (organized events on places like meetup.com, etc ... even tinder make it easy). But the quality of these connections is shallow and very short.
also the more time we spend on social media the less time we have to work on real connections (which is massive effort).
I'm not surprised by the high rates of 35+ age group as it is very difficult for people (and males in general) to form new meaningful long term bonds after setting down. Add the likelyhood of divorce, burnout or unemployment rates in those age groups it is no wonder. :(
I think there is something the rest of us could learn from this.
There's considerable lag in the statistics.
Someone dies; their death is investigated and a ruling is made; statisticians collect the data, collate a report, and release the data.
The dataset for 2013 could be talking about deaths in 2011.
I myself have lost a close friend from scouts. He was a complex person, orphan from another country adopted into affluent US family. Struggled to fit in, he was short and heavy, but he had a kind soul and loved to blacksmith, making swords and weaponry. He never quite succeeded with girls or social circles, but eventually he met a girl on WoW finally, moved across country for her, since he felt he had nothing else positive in his life. She married then divorced him within 2 years, and he killed himself soon after, feeling he had no other prospects and having no adequate treatments for his depression.
- the only implied remedy is seeking help from a mental health professional.
- said professionals are in short supply and high demand and are inaccessible to many people for financial and other reasons.
- there is often a proximate cause of acute depression that may be remedied to prevent suicide without addressing deeper underlying causes.
- a blanket labeling of "mental illness" is about as specific and helpful as "demonic possession" or any similarly vague term.
- many psychological issues have organic components that are better addressed by a doctor.
You don't have to have a mental illness to want to take your own life. Although some mental illnesses are associated with suicidal tendencies or increased prevalence.
Not always.
We know that economic downturn will always see an increase in deaths by suicide, without a similar increase in rates of diagnosis of mental illness.
This is a bit misleading, deaths by suicide can be quantified but the rates of diagnosis depend on people's and willingness and access to mental health resources.
Please, stop saying that only mentally ill people thinking killing themselves. You cause direct harm when you do so.
(This is all naturally just my own understanding of an incredibly complex topic.)
Mental illness isn't some entirely distinct entity or disease that overtakes the body like a cancer or parasite. It is a failure to regulate within what we deem 'normal' bounds of neurological and behavioural homeostasis. This failure to regulate is complex and still not well understood. Some 'disorders' are due to deficiencies in specific neurotransmitters, as far as we can tell. Others may even be related to gut biome or general inflammatory response of the body. We know that 'mental illness' in later life is highly correlated with exposure to adverse childhood experiences. We also know that environmental factors such as sunshine, nature and bodily movement somehow affect the prevalence and expression of behavioural disorders. Why should all of this be the case if 'mental illness' were just a simple disease?
"Mental Illness" unfortunately grossly oversimplifies a set of different things. It's like characterising a person with a broken leg, another with cystic fibrosis, and another with a stomach ache due to over-eating all as simply "bodily ill" and ignoring the vast differences in prognosis and treatment between them.
Suicide like all other behaviours humans immerse themselves in is complex and not clearly attributable to any specific cause or set of circumstances. There are correlations that would invite theories but it is not a simple thing. As euthanasia rights increase across the globe, as well, you can see old and young people alike taking a cognitive view of their status and concluding that death would be the best course of action in light of extreme and chronic pain. There is no singular defining distinguishing factor between the cold-hard cognitive rationale of euthanasia and the ostensibly 'infected' mind-state of suicide. There is not single reason why people commit suicide. If we are to say that suicide is due to "mental illness" then we may as well say that it is due to "bodily disfunction" or "misaligned bodily tissues". Closing off the arena of understanding by oversimplifying a vastly complex behaviour is not of service to reducing that behaviour.
[citation needed]
Interestingly, the trend of suicide among females seems to be unaffected. The rate is steadily increasing, but the trend has been nearly the same since at least 2000. There's a noticeable increase in the suicide trend for males starting in 2013. (If I'm interpreting the graphs correctly)
Although it is the most important part of the data. Why are men increasingly chosing to end their lifes?
Could there be a relation between the growing dominance of anti-male 4. wave feminist viewpoints in society and propaganda in the media and this statistics?
Coincidentally the fourth wave feminism started exactly one year before the increase in suicides.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/19/thresholds-of-...
The overview is that for gun violence, one act makes the next one slightly more likely. When people see someone perform an act, ones like shootings or suicides, others see it as somewhat more acceptable.
Here's a relevant quote:
> In the elegant theoretical model Granovetter proposed, riots were started by people with a threshold of zero—instigators willing to throw a rock through a window at the slightest provocation. Then comes the person who will throw a rock if someone else goes first. He has a threshold of one. Next in is the person with the threshold of two. His qualms are overcome when he sees the instigator and the instigator’s accomplice. Next to him is someone with a threshold of three, who would never break windows and loot stores unless there were three people right in front of him who were already doing that—and so on up to the hundredth person, a righteous upstanding citizen who nonetheless could set his beliefs aside and grab a camera from the broken window of the electronics store if everyone around him was grabbing cameras from the electronics store.
Take out riots, and add suicides, and there's a match.
I know people can have different opinions on Gladwell, but I feel this is a very well thought out writing about it, and in a way that isn't talked about.
Here's a podcast episode where he talks about it too:
https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/political-scene/malcolm-gl...
It's okay to be a failure or a loser. Don't listen to your parents', teachers' or peers' bullshit. Live the life that makes you happy.
Specific projects and efforts may fail. You may lose a specific contest. But that doesn't change you into a 'loser' or a 'failure'.
Do these charts not coincide exactly with the introduction and pervasiveness of smart phones and social media? The rates were dropping until 2007 when the iPhone was introduced, and it only went up from there as more and more social apps rolled out.
Computers did not help me because I spent long hours on them in my room alone and if I didn't have them I likely would have found some group at school to fit in with.
It's likely that counting of deaths was disrupted by the war, and it was already inconsistent because of the criminality of suicide and the desire of coroners to "protect" the relatives from a highly stigmatising suicide verdict.
The rate of death has increased in this agre group on both sides of the Atlantic.
The confusion many have comes from not understanding how complicated it is to immigrate even in the best conditions. It's the same sort of idea people in the US use against immigrants here claiming "they can just do it legally". You cannot just "move" to another country because you want to. There are legal, financial, situational requirements that must be met and it's not something just anyone can up and do. Quite often those who want to move to other countries the most due to ideological or quality of life reasons are the least able to legally as a result of their experiences in their home nations. I lost my health and financial security due to for-profit healthcare. Then the adversarial and broken social security system denied me help. There is no social safety net here and opportunity to rebuild once you are crushed. So with that in mind I'd LOVE to immigrate but cannot meet the requirements because of what was taken from me. I have tried and worsening conditions as a result of the above derailed the process. You have no protection until you are legitimized and/or attain citizenship. To add insult to injury did you know that the USA is the only country that CHARGES a fee to give up your citizenship? It was nearly $3000 last time I checked and increases based on assets. Also one of the only that taxes it's citizens' income earned abroad. I'd happily exit this place and never look back were it an option.
Definitely not representative of the Lockian free association of commonwealths that US was founded on!
Pretty much everybody from, say, Ghana, can expect to have a better life that is worth the transition in Denmark, but few Danes can expect to have a better life in Belgium that offsets the cost of moving, learning a new language and switching cultures. If European cultures were more similar to the US and there was no language barrier or bureaucratic difficulties, I'd expect more migration, similar to how people will look for greener pastures within their home country.
They can't. Call up an immigration lawyer in another first world country and ask about what would be required. The moment you say you are from the US, half of your available migration options vanish.
Page 21 - https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/self-directed-vio...
There are a huge number of drug-related deaths in the US, so if these were counted we'd expect to see huge rises in all ages.
Most of these comments don't appear to have read anything, just discussing....
Mine haven't been transitory. If anything they get worse. Sure it's sensible for a kid to see if they can get out into life and improve their circumstances, or someone in some acute situation like losing a loved one etc to navigate the situation, but the "it gets better" and "permanent solution to a temporary problem" tropes are fallacies beyond a select few groups.
Additionally, the concept of hell is surprisingly prevalent across many religions and philosophies. It is not just in the Christian New Testament. Plato describes something like hell in the dialogue Republic, for those who have repeatedly chosen their passions over their reason. There is a similar concept in Buddhism. The idea is that hell is not a place people get thrown arbitrarily for actions beyond their control, but it is essentially a place they put themselves through their repeated, knowledgeable and voluntary choices.
All that being said, thinking about the possibility of hell I believe was helpful at least to make me reconsider whether things in my life were really all that bad, all things considered. Trying my best to imagine endless torment (tough to do, try it!) is at the very least sobering and a bit of a wakeup call.
- how can I minimize at most the damage done to my close ones? Yes suicide is a transfer of pain, but only a partial transfer. Full transfer would make life unlivable - what do I do if I'm saved and everyone knows? - Is there a hell waiting for suicidal persons? Is reincarnation real, and if so will this hellish life begin again? - What's the best way to minimize the persons discovering your body?
They are dedicated and spend monthes/years not only perfecting the method (most serious candidates always pick the same one) but talking about themselves about these problems:
- how can I minimize at most the damage done to my close ones? Yes suicide is a transfer of pain, but only a partial transfer. Full transfer would make their life unlivable
- what do I do if I'm saved and everyone knows? -
- Is there a hell waiting for suicidal persons? Is reincarnation real, and if so will this hellish life begin again?
- What's the best way to minimize the trauma inflicted to the persons discovering your body?
Life is pretty fucking miserable for a large part (perhaps even most) of the world on a daily basis. I doubt they'd share your can-do attitude on this subject.
Any type/form of exercising act as the detox for the mind's negative energy. Not saying this is the magic pill (I understand, depression is a real thing and needs to be treated) but I am sure exercising can help in some cases.
Similarly, we are all too familiar with the negative impacts of social media.
I'd imagine suicide is a much tougher sell if someone believes in an eternal hell for suicides, and an eternal heaven for those who hold onto hope.