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Comment by nonwifehaver3 | Hacker News Reader

This has some graphs showing the suicide rates for different age groups: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2207007-us-suicide-rate...

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.

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The suicide rates by ethnicity are very interesting as well - white people have a significantly higher suicide rate (2x) than most other ethnicity, despite presumably facing fewer problems overall.

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).

Maybe, another theory I've heard from Chris Hedges is that minorities never believed in the myth of the American Dream.

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/

This rings true to me. They told me that if I worked hard, then I'd be successful by default. At some point in my early 20s, I realized that it wasn't true at all, and it hit me like a ton of bricks. I was severely depressed and felt like a failure, right up until the point where I accidentally stumbled into being a programmer and turned out to be good at it.

theres a tweet thats been blowing up among us kids/post grads

https://twitter.com/yaboyjaeb/status/1142137347456344064

I know this feeling very well, made considerably worse by the fact that I happened to be friends with some people who for various reasons did end up being very, very successful. It took me a very long time to realise that they were the outliers rather than me being a failure, and I still doubt myself.

I think a lot of it is also due to minorities becoming better educated and being treated more fairly in the job market (both domestically and due to globalization), there is more competition for jobs now, so you can't just be successful by default because you are an educated white person who shows up on time. And a lot of people are probably seeing their standard of living decrease from childhood->mid adulthood as they are affected by this transition to a work environment where race plays less of a factor. Another factor is that the percentage of people getting bachelor's degrees over time keeps going up, so degrees are also getting more common and are ending up to be a less competitive advantage.

> 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.

Those rates to not appear to be normalized to account for the proportional differences across ethnicities. Based on the 2010 census, ~75% of the population identifies as white[1]. Based on that, the white suicide rate appears to be lower than their minority counterparts. From the link in the GP, based on 2017 numbers:

  White: 38%
  Native American: 31%
  Asian/Pacific Islander: 16%
  Black/African American: 15%

The Native American number is the most striking to me because, again, from the 2010 census, only 0.9% of respondents identified as Native American[1]. Perhaps that number is also including Latinos?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_Unit...

That chart is already in Deaths per 100,000 people, so it does indeed show the white and Native American suicide rates to be significantly higher than black and Asian rates.

Correct, but it is not normalized to account for population differences. The white suicide rate is ~2.5x higher than the black suicide rate, but there are ~5.75x more white people than black people in the US. Therefore, normalizing for population proportion, the black suicide rate is more than twice that of their white counterparts.

> The white suicide rate is ~2.5x higher than the black suicide rate, but there are ~5.75x more white people than black people in the US. Therefore, normalizing for population proportion, the black suicide rate is more than twice that of their white counterparts.

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.

More precisely, it is deaths per 100,000 people from the target group. I think the parent is interpreting it as "suicides by white people per 100,000 people in the general population", when it is actually "suicides per 100,000 white people."

Naw, we're pretty depressed by the structural racism thing. https://www.nimhd.nih.gov/docs/byomm_factsheet02.pdf

What part of that fact sheet contradicts something I said? The "what are some of the barriers" section actually demonstrates my point - it provides external reasons for depression and mental health issues, which only apply to minorities. If you are not a minority, you can't really use these to explain why you are depressed or in a bad situation.

> 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.

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

http://newjimcrow.com/

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.

Freakanomics did an interesting podcast about the same theory, what they called the "no oney left to blame" hypothesis.

>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.

http://freakonomics.com/podcast/happiness/

There are many confounding variables here that make it difficult to draw a convincing conclusion. The ethnic disparity can partially be explained by the fact that white men have higher handgun ownership rates than other demographics (my guess is this is because white men also have higher incomes, not because white men inherently like guns), and such access to guns is associated with increased suicide risk.

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.

I was initially surprised to see the relatively high rates in the early part of the 20th century. Some of these seem intuitively obvious, like the higher rates during the Great Depression.

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.

The suicide rate always dips after wars, at least historical wars. Wars, again speaking historically. reduced the male population. After the war, surviving males easily find mates and settle into stable homes, resulting in baby booms. It doesn't take much. A change of a few percentage points can radically change the dating scene.

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 think what you're referring to may be different. If you look at the data in the initial graph, suicide rate increases after both WW1 and WW2. It actually went down __during__ the wars and not after, which falls more in line with Junger's book.

The interesting thing about early 20th century is the wild swings in the suicide rate, a much more extreme series of swings than any time later. It seems like an indication that during that time, some greater degree of "contagion" was going on relative to later time (not sure from what). Another factor might be spottier records and a smaller population. The suicides from the 1929 stock crash were fodder for much literature and the seems to show an increase up to 1929 and then a steep decrease.

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

Looking at historical rates of suicide is really hard because it was still a crime in many places, and there was strong social convention to not name something as suicide unless the evidence was overwhelming.

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.

Epidemiology was in its infancy during that time period, I wouldn't compare or analyze those rates too closely. This is during the time of Freudian hogwash, before DSM, before knowledge of genetics or any current understanding of neurophysiology. Cultural awareness of psychology has also changed vastly, and broader awareness leads to broader diagnosis in many disorders.

Tinder and online dating going mainstream. The male suicide rate is like 10x that of the female. Males struggle in today’s dating market.

Women struggle too, but get scared away by creeps and being put in scary situations. Women need to feel safe, not fear rape, and not feel treated just like a sex object.

Just don't be creepy and respect women.

> and not feel treated just like a sex object.

Tinder might be the wrong place for that.

Yeah, my girlfriend has told me so many stories of the men she dated from Tinder. And of the men she spent time with in the singles' club we met in. And frankly it's understandable that those men are single because most of the stories were of them either not actually attempting to connect with her as a human being, or they were stories of them outwardly objectifying her before even introducing themselves, or they were stories of crippling social anxiety. And as a rule none of them gave any indication they were aware of these things as problems that could be worked on or solved. So it doesn't surprise me there are a bunch of single men out there desperate for attention from women, because there appear to be a bunch of single men out there who are totally unable to take responsibility for or to fix their own problems.

How one knows what to fix regarding character and behaviour, if for the person nothing works? Not a little bit, less often, a little bit later, a little bit different, with different kind of person. Nothing works, never.

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).

Truth be told I think it comes down to dating apps attracting shitty people in general.

>. And frankly it's understandable that those men are single because most of the stories were of them either not actually attempting to connect with her as a human being, or they were stories of them outwardly objectifying her before even introducing themselves, or they were stories of crippling social anxiety.

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.

On Tinder objectification goes both ways - "swipe left if you're under 180cm".

> Just don't be creepy and respect women.

Doing both of these and at best I'm friendzoned onto the Moon. Not working, sorry.

> friendzoned

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.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYMKMG71NYI

The jump from statistical behavior to personal advice is kind of odd. I'm not saying it's bad advice but we're talking average behavior of population - the average person obviously isn't going to hear this personal advice.

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.

It's been ~4x since 1999. If whatever "it" is were only affecting males, the ratio would have changed. But female suicide is also going up. The article shows a spike for 15-19 females around 2012. 20-24 females have been steadily going up since 1999 but no similar 2012 spike. I don't think this study and the New Scientist article are using the exact same data, but the drift is similar (US young people are killing themselves more).

To me the date that stands out most starkly is that everything was improving until 9/11, until it started back upwards. Suicide rates by veterans (due to PTSD) aren't broken out separately but they are notoriously high, and the US has been at war since then.

May also be worth considering school shootings and the psychological impact of "preventative" drills inducing fear of them.

technology & social media which lead people into isolation and despite promising the opposite, a less-connected live.

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. :(

Popular media conveys this conception that the Amish are opposed to technology for religious reasons, but this is incorrect. The Amish place a high value on maintaining their culture, and within that culture familial and community interactions are among the most important ideals. Consequently, each community takes a considered look at technology and how it might influence their culture, and simply choose not to adopt those that they believe would have a negative influence.

I think there is something the rest of us could learn from this.

So where did zippers falls on the spectrum of "drive the community apart"?

Probably in the realm of "can't be manufactured within the community leading to a reliance on the outside world for something we don't really need". Not relying on the outside world is also a pretty big theme of their culture.

> starting in 2013

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 find this chart by age and cohort to be a bit more illustrative. https://imgur.com/gallery/UZVEt

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