Release of “13 Reasons Why” Associated with Increase in Youth Suicide Rates
nimh.nih.gov
nimh.nih.gov
In the show, this teen's suicide was portrayed to have had an impact on many students/families/teachers etc for a very long time after the incident. It almost glorified the suicide and the methods of leaving tapes behind.
Real suicide is not so glorious and does not leave a much of an impact as you would think, other than on the immediate family.
For example, when my mother committed suicide, my sister, grandparents and myself were impacted severely for a bit, but outside of our family circle it didn't have as much of an impact.
When I was in high school, we had a student commit suicide, which we ended up having 1 school meeting regarding it, but after about a week it had been forgotten by most and swept under the rug as everyone moved on to the next thing.
I guess I am biased based on my two experiences with suicide, however glorifying it in any way will only lead to more incidents.
It is sad to think how ephemeral life can be, but the living and legacy aspects. It can also be freeing.
It seems like teens today do face challenges that weren’t faced by my generation or the ones before that. Social media, internet enabled always on devices seem to have changed the experience of being a teenager. Perhaps there are deeper issues at stake that need addressing?
This is an example of where Netflix acted without thinking what impacts a show like this will have. Nothing exists in a vacuum, and this was on Netflix to resolve.
The first step in this case would be to take it down from Netflix. Or they're going to face people calling for it to be taken down through the state.
I'm just explaining the system we have right now and how netflix is playing with fire.
Sure you can. Stop watching it. Tell your friends to stop watching it and why. The media nowadays is all about going over the top and sensationalizing things because that's what gets the eyeballs on the screens and that's where the advertisements get them money.
Hurt their wallets and they'll stop.
We cannot hurt their wallets because generally people don't care. Maybe eventually humans will change. However, once they notice different trends they will adopt. They don't care either, they just maximizing profits. It is simple really.
Did it work?
There is far too much momentum behind mass-market media for this nearly passive resistance to be effective. Things like "'13 Reasons Why' linked to 29% increase in in teen suicides 1 month later" have far more impact and are more effective. Public outrage seems to work, for better or worse.
My entire point is to be active about the resistance. Don't just stop using something. Tell others to stop using and say why. Cease any and all contact with that media channel.
The only way this works is when the right thing to do also happens to be the profitable thing to do.
Limit second amendment more to prevent mass shootings.
Limit first amendment more to prevent suicides.
Really though, we should be focusing on the root cause: lonely/sad/broken people. Focus on helping/loving them and I bet suicide/mass shooting rates drop significantly.
I've always wondered the validity of a "constitutional freedom" that allows random everyday people to own and operate tools that are essentially killing machines.
Not sure why you put quotes around constitutional freedom.
The reason for the amendment is such that when someone or someones come along and attempt to abridge your rights you can kill them with the killing machine.
As simple as that.
It's weird to me that advocating for the cessation of an absolute right to self-defense is a mainstream political position.
It's not as if history is one peachy peace-and-love orgy.
The other side here is basically just people supporting and voting for the laws they think will improve society, a.k.a. democracy working normally.
On the other hand, the moral majority can make the law and then murder people who don't follow it. This is called "democracy working normally".
Your position just comes off as saying "in its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges".
There are also certain demographics that are much likelier to own guns, so "is armed revolution necessary" is really more a question of "is this particular group of people unhappy".
So much this. Growing up, it was so strange to see people pulling out a gun on someone for walking on their lawn in Hollywood movies.
Isn't that what highly trained and professional law enforcement is for?
At least that's what they're for in my part of the world.
That works fine and well until the police are the ones kicking in your door to drag you away.
Fortunately for us all, that's not a thing that ever happens.
Since it clearly needs said, the 2A is not about day-to-day life. It's about large-scale societal failure modes.
In a situation in which you have to shoot someone to save yourself, it's implicitly understood that the law enforcement won't be there for at least another 15 minutes.
Also, who will call them? You may have to shoot your opponent first, just to be able to call the police. At least in the leg or something, if killing makes you squeamish.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia
Every adult should have the means to protect who they care about.
> At least that's what they're for in my part of the world.
I really wish the Jewish populations of Warsaw had known this. If only they had called on the professional law enforcement to help them! And then the Tutsi made the same mistake in Rwanda 50 years later - shouldn't people have learned by then?
Point is, sometimes it's the "professional law enforcement" that's coming to kick your face in, and asking them to defend you doesn't work so well. And even when they aren't the ones doing the kicking, their priorities might not match yours - as Koreatown found in the LA riots.
No, the reason for the amendment was the perception (possibly true) that reliance on citizens militias for internal and external security was an essential guarantee of liberty, as otherwise the government would have no choice but to rely on professional forces (army/police) that would become culturally distinct from the general population and become oppressive either on their own or on behalf of the government which would become more attached to it's security services through whuhbit applied force, and which could withhold that ability or use it in ways the political authority did not approve of unsatisfied, than the general public. Combined with the perception (false, as it turned out) that the only thing needed to protect this model was to assure that the government's understandable desire to regulate weaponry didn't make it impractical to rely on militias of the citizenry for this purpose.
The idea was that it would be impossible to oppress the general public if the government had to call up the general public to do the oppressing, whereas if there was a distinct warrior tribe whose whole profession was applying force as ordered by higher authority, the government would be much more able and inclined to be oppressive.
Unfortunately, even those who hold themselves out as defenders of the second amendment have forgotten it's purpose.
That's not true, though. U.S. laws and their enforcement are extremely punitive compared to most other western countries. It seems the values are very specifically centered around the right to own guns, not around protecting individuals from society in general.
That's not true, though. The US is a lot less punitive regarding cars compared to most other western countries.
Some of the citizens overthrowing the government would be in the military, though, no? Since the military is made up of normal people that live among civilians. It's more likely the military would split into factions, with the revolutionaries gaining control of a sizable chunk of tanks, airplanes, etc. Or maybe the military would stage a coup.
However, a truly tyrannical government would have long purged guns from its civilian population as evidenced by every tyranny ever.
It'd be a mess.
Very unlikely. Biggest part of military training is brainwashing you to always following orders. People that resist brainswashing are quickly discharges as "unfit for duty".
The US military has both Republicans and Democrats in it (though probably a larger percentage of the former). If there is any sort of internal conflict, it would likely split along those party lines. Also, the US military does not advocate blindly following orders. The person receiving the orders should only obey lawful orders and should resist and disobey unlawful orders ("I order you to go shoot all those unarmed civilians over there!")
Could you point out the brainwashing sessions in Navy boot camp perhaps?
I do remember a constitutional law class we all had to take where we were specifically taught that we had an absolute duty to refuse unlawful orders, maybe you were confused and for things backwards?
Look at the Chinese response to the protests in Hong Kong. Are they flying bombers over the city and setting up artillery? No, they're using forces of infantry, police, and paramilitary thugs who are far outnumbered by the protesters. If they actually leveled one of their own cities the entire government would collapse on itself.
However, given a sufficient percentage of the population which is interested in doing this, it would be very difficult even for the US military to completely conquer.
87 deaths from a truck ramming attack. The existing licensing system was obviously insufficient to prevent this attack. What do you suggest be done to prevent attacks like this in the future?
If that's not your intent, can you clarify what your intent is? I'm probably not the only one who read it that way.
If it's motivated purely by the desire to shoot people with cool badass assault rifles, then banning things that look like assault rifles would solve it. If it's just the desire to shoot people, then you would have to ban all firearms.
However, if it's caused by the desire to kill, with no regard for the mechanism, then banning guns would have no or little effect: they would move to the next-easiest node in the attack tree.[1] If you ban all trucks, then attackers would try to burn down high rises, or poison water mains, or release sarin gas in subway stations, etc etc.
The observation that these other attacks are exotic and weird is only weak evidence for to the question if mass shootings are for the shooting, or the killing.
---
1: https://www.schneier.com/academic/archives/1999/12/attack_tr...
I'm in favor of gun control but I don't think it's clear whether it would actually make it meaningfully harder for people who want to kill lots of people indiscriminately-ish.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-ramming_attack#List_of...
That said, there's certainly another conversation over whether we should consider how valuable human life is compared to the conveniences modern tools like firearms and private vehicles give us. Or I guess we've already collectively decided that the answer is no.
I disagree with this formulation of the question. It isn't either or. For a lot of people, that "freedom afforded to us by constitutional degree" is what allows to protect the value of their own human life in the case of an immediate danger, as well as that of people close to them.
While I'm sympathetic to the argument of weaponry as a balance-of-power between government and governed [1], in the modern era it's hard to see its application to civilian-grade firearms as anything more than a fantasy. (If one wants to examine this seriously, I suspect the weapons of choice for a modern insurrection would be things like IEDs, micro-drones, and hacking/encryption.)
Still, I think the argument is sound for a right to self-protection independent of government. There just isn't an obvious "bright line" as to what level of destructive power is reasonable for a private citizen, as one progresses from muskets to AR-15s to RPGs to hydrogen bombs. (It is also an open question as to whether regulations like licensing, mandatory safety training, and civil liability count as "infringement", to say nothing of denying weapons to known criminals or the mentally ill.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carroll_Quigley#Weapons_and_de...
It's "too powerful" for civilians if it's fully automatic or explosive (RPGs, hand grenades, bombs, etc.)
I think the amendment seems fairly clear to me. I, too, disagree that it should be enshrined in the constitution, or even that it should exist as a right in such an unrestricted form. But there's no doubt that it's in there, and we already have a process for changing the constitution.
If I were a Supreme Court justice, I would push to invalidate all laws that limit the ownership and carrying of guns or any armaments by private citizens. This is really the only thing that would force us as a nation to come to some sort of consensus on what the bounds of gun regulation and legislation should be, on a constitutional level.
This is reasonable as a principle of justice, but it means that we are prevented from achieving consensus on the bounds of Congress's and the several state's power to regulate the keeping and bearing of arms unless we amend the constitution to make those boundaries clear. My approach above is a bit scorched earth, but I think there's a consensus to be found between the anti-gun people and the reasonable-gun-control people that might exclude the gun rights absolutists, but result in some sensible middle ground.
> Limit first amendment more to prevent suicides.
The logical conclusion from social-contagion would be not to report or limit reporting, both for suicide and mass-shooting.
"Focus on helping/loving them" is not a policy change, to me it's nothing but "thoughts and prayers". Rhetoric that might make us feel better but will help nothing.
The clear change that should be suggested is more proactive identification of mental illness and increased guaranteed access to mental health services. If that reads to you as nothing but "thoughts and prayers", I don't know what to say.
https://www.sprc.org/means-suicide
It turns out more willpower/commitment is needed to jump off a bridge than pull a trigger. The same with stabbing or suffocating yourself. Yes, someone with lots of willpower/commitment will work around it, but for those just teetering on the edge guns are very very effective.
Here's an idea that doesn't infringe on any rights: Mandate each handgun sale come with a free suicide prevention pamphlet. That would definitely lower suicide rates measurably at a low cost that everyone can agree on.
The evidence says otherwise. Most suicidal ideation is brief and impulsive, so making it harder to access effective means of suicide doesn't just lead to a substitution. Multiple studies have found a lasting reduction in the overall suicide rate after a highly lethal means of suicide became less easily available.
The majority of people who survive a suicide attempt say that they decided to attempt suicide less than an hour beforehand; simply increasing the delay between impulse and action can be life-saving.
90% of people who attempt suicide do not go on to make a further attempt, so merely inducing people to choose a less lethal method is a net win.
Even still, there are other ways of increasing suicide friction than outright bans. Firearm waiting periods (to prevent same-day purchase suicides) would increase friction, suicide pamphlets with every sale would increase friction, etc
- When Sri Lanka replaced a common pesticide which made it easy for farmers to commit suicide with another one that was not as toxic to humans, suicide rates fell by half: [1]
- Many different bridges which were popular suicide sites installed bridges and found that overall suicides decreased and did not relocate to nearby bridges without nets. Here is one example from Montreal, there are many others: [2]
It is very well-established in the literature that eliminating easy means to suicide does reduce total suicides and causes only a minor a displacement effect to other methods. Your obstinance on this fact is only making you look like a flat-earther.
[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC478945/
- The coal gas phaseout's associated decrease in suicide rates principally affected men; women more readily jumped to other alternatives (as indicated on the graphs). It also principally affected England and Wales (Scotland showed far more modest decreases in suicide among men, and effectively no change among women), which prompted the authors of that paper to exclude Scotland from their conclusions due to the anomalous data; it's possible that Scotland didn't phase out coal gas as quickly, but the drop in suicide-by-CO-suffocation seems to support the idea that Scotland and England/Wales were under the same conditions.
- Per the chart in the Sri Lanka article that breaks down poisoning v. "other specified methods" v. "other means", poisoning actually increased (even ignoring the spike in 1983), and most of the reductions were in the "other means" category (which was completely eliminated by 2005). The "Data for risk factors in suicide" section also details various other factors that are more probable than banning a specific kind of poison (namely: the civil war that was raging in Sri Lanka during almost all of time period when suicide rates fell, consistent with the article's remark that suicide rates do typically fall significantly during times of war).
- The Montreal article only concludes that suicide specifically by jumping did not displace to other jumping sites. It makes no conclusion around other means of suicide (and while suicide rates did fall in general, the article states that this trend began 5 years before the installation of the nets on the studied bridge).
EDIT: in general, I don't feel like any of those sources do an adequate job of isolating these potential causes from other factors; they do demonstrate at least some correlation, but - as the saying famously goes - correlation != causation, and there are numerous other factors that tend to drive suicide rates, especially socioeconomic and cultural.
I know the US is just very bad at this, but you can literally look at other countries and learn from their experiences. I know, some of them don't speak the same language, but it turns out Americans are just human like everybody else.
Interventions _work_ without making suicide impossible, because the suicide victims aren't rational people looking to kill themselves, they are crazy and have fixated on a plan that would kill them. When the plan doesn't work they are reset by that and most won't kill themselves.
The most internationally famous example is Town Gas. Britain used to make a dangerous but useful flammable gas called "Town Gas" by processing coal. The gas burned reasonably cleanly and coal was readily available, but the gas was toxic and so you may have heard the phrase "Stick your head in the oven" - the idea isn't that you could somehow cook your own head, but toxic Town Gas will poison you and you'd die. Britain used to see lots of suicides by this method.
And then, not to prevent suicide but for simple economic reasons having discovered huge natural gas reserves in the North Sea, Britain switched to Natural Gas. Things had to be reconfigured, there are still left-over buildings and equipment littering the country decades later, but it just made obvious economic sense to switch. Natural Gas, however, though technically it could suffocate you, isn't poisonous and is very disinterested in remaining even a poorly ventilated kitchen, it just floats off. So people who lay down with their head in the oven after Natural Gas didn't die. They'd lay there, and eventually they'd realise this isn't working - and they would get up and get on with their lives.
This _actually worked_ entirely by accident, the suicide rate dropped significantly. A natural experiment, and to refuse to learn from that is extremely dense.
And if guns aren't available, they'll fixate on a plan which does not involve them. The coal→natgas switch only worked to prevent suicides because (at least per your description) people still expected the gas to kill them; if suicidal people already know ahead of time that a particular strategy is not actually an option (e.g. because they know they can't get guns, or they know that the gas in their ovens ain't toxic), then they'll consider some other strategy in the "pick a strategy" stage of suicidal ideation.
That is: this sort of "prevention" is temporary at best. Even in the UK, phasing out coal gas only decreased suicides specifically via carbon monoxide inhalation, while other methods of suicide rose in frequency [1]. The overall rate did decrease, but more for males than females (who readily seemed to start flocking toward other methods of suicide, at least per the graphs and the apparent far-more-modest decrease in overall suicide rate), and primarily only in England and Wales (Scotland's male suicide rate barely budged, and the female suicide rate held steady, with a visible switch from CO suicide to non-CO suicide in the graphs).
Hangings are currently the most common means of suicide in the UK [2], with poisonings a close second among women. Neither of these are likely to go away any time soon without actually addressing why people feel inclined to self-terminate in the first place (unless you're going to propose trying to ban all alcohol and drugs - like the US tried (and failed) to do - and require background checks and mental health checks when buying ropes and bedsheets, and even that almost certainly won't be effective).
You have to be prepared for legislation like this only slightly decrease the number of suicides but drastically increase the suffering of the people that do.
From wikipedia's page on LN2:
> the liquid-to-gas expansion ratio of nitrogen is 1:694 at 20 °C (68 °F)
(so it can easily displace a lot of air in a small volume and)
>As liquid nitrogen evaporates it reduces the oxygen concentration in the air and can act as an asphyxiant, especially in confined spaces. Nitrogen is odorless, colorless, and tasteless and may produce asphyxia without any sensation or prior warning
Also, you know what takes even less willpower than passing a background check (or stealing/borrowing/buying a gun + ammo from someone else illegally), paying hundreds of dollars for a gun + ammo, pointing it at the right spot on one's own head (to actually die instead of just maiming oneself) and pulling the trigger? Buying $20 worth of over-the-counter painkillers and chugging the bottle, or buying a $10 bottle of hard liquor and chugging that (with or without the painkillers), or running a $5 tube from the exhaust of a running car to the interior and taking a nap.
And on that note, firearms are only more popular than other means of suicide among males; per your source, females typically prefer poisoning (though firearms are almost tied). Both males and females have an equally-high tendency (around 25%) to commit suicide via suffocation (and for females under 24, that skyrockets to almost an absolute majority). A "perfect" world where firearms don't exist won't make those go away, and the people who'd kill themselves with guns would almost certainly gravitate toward other means (as the multitude of suicidal young people without firearms access already tend to do).
(Additionally: your source doesn't seem to specify whether or not those numbers are for actual deaths or attempts; lots of people survive their suicide attempts, whether because they didn't use an effective method or because someone intervened. It'd be interesting to see that distinction; I suspect the graphs are only recording actual deaths, which means that firearms are going to be skewed because they're more effective at actually ensuring death, while poisoning and suffocation might be far more popular but less effective.)
Getting enough pills to do yourself in without a prescription is super hard and not very reliable. Most OTC drugs will cause you to vomit long before you die. Anyways, this is the route my terminally ill mom took with a doctor’s help, the best way to do it anyways. (I only knew two people who committed suicide, the other one was a girl who shot herself in the head in high school)
Surviving a suicide by gun is kind of gruesome, it isn’t something I want to think about.
There are plenty of great reasons to restrict firearms, making suicide more difficult is just one of them. Honestly, it’s only something you have to worry about if you have guns in the house in the first place (the girls’ dad was the heavily pro gun type, so she had easy access), so it’s easy to opt out of that problem for us anti gun types (unlike say mass school shootings).
It's actually ridiculously easy in the US, especially when combined with alcohol (probably easier than illicitly obtaining a gun, given that far more Americans have pills laying around than guns). Reliability is another story (but - again - increases with alcohol). This also assumes that even kids (let alone adults) don't have access to prescriptions (which would be a poor assumption, given the ongoing opiate addiction crisis and American doctors' tendencies to write morphine et. al. prescriptions up the wazoo, as well as the fact that sometimes kids get sick, too).
And that ain't even mentioning illegal drugs; heroin and methamphetamines are pretty commonplace in the US, as are accidental overdoses (and given that suicides do tend to be spur of the moment, it's possible - probable, even - that suicide by illegal narcotics - be they illegally-obtained prescription drugs or hard recreational drugs - goes substantially unreported and instead lumped in with accidental overdoses).
For many however - through personal experience - it is something planned for, hoped for, dreamed about - for as long as decades.
Which is why there has been a push to secure bridges and add crisis phone lines to these areas.
We should be tackling the problem from every direction. I'd love for it to happen but it sure doesn't seem like the US is going to make any progress in guaranteed access to mental health services anytime soon.
Yes!
One thing that help to increase mass shootings and suicide was the anti-asylum movement. many people who clearly are a danger to himself and others should be hospitalized. unfortunately asylum got a bad reputation for inhumane treatments, but modern psychiatric treatment is completely different that the past inhumane treatments.
I'm on board with increased access to mental health facilities, but I'm skeptical of using them for convicts unless the convict consents. Psychiatric treatment often involves medication, and I don't believe anyone should be forced to take medicine, especially mind-altering medication.
People who would not be able to stick a knife into themselves fatally, or dare to jump off a high place, are nevertheless capable of shooting themselves.
I had a friend who unsuccessfully attempted suicide by a pistol in the mouth. He ended up with a hole in his nose. Having only brought one bullet with him, was in enough pain to get treatment. He still wears a small bandaid on the side of his nose, but he’s in a stable place now.
What change(s) as relates to limiting the 2A would help to reduce suicide?
We also know poverty and financial stress leads to increased suicide, in fact close to 20% are directly related.
and yet, while the stock market is at record highs, companies are more profitable than ever, workers are more efficient than ever, inequality and debt has skyrocketed to historical highs.
The real question is what would come first: gun regulation(s) or some reforms to our economy so people are not living hand to mouth, indebted their entire lives, and have access to healthcare which includes mental health. My guess is neither. People in the US will continue to offer hopes and prayers (over social media no less for the virtue signaling and likes) but the vast majority wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire.
The supply is limited to what was legally owned as of 1986.
* Let's not examine root causes of anything because freedom
* Freedom by itself is good no matter of consequences
* This is a very US-centric view as no other country has first or second amendment
* How preventing mass shootings is a scary thing, and in which way limiting second amendment is scary?
* Same argument applies to the question you raise about first amendment. What is the use of free speech if all it does is exploit people who are vulnerable to committing suicide?
* Your comment about lonely/sad/broken people is not constructive. There are no actionable items. Instead of academic research you are proposing hearsay and a bet.
We need some level of balance here.. unlimited guns and unlimited media has been a recipe for disaster.
So why weren't teenagers in the 60s shooting up crowded places with full-auto machine guns (they were fully legal and accessible back then)?
It’s certainly not the case that they had more access to mental health.
Hence back to the media part. Society / culture changes... 60s was a wave of anti-violence by youth. That likely had carry over effects. What was on TV and the methods of consuming information was totally different. You also didn’t have so much contradictory (dis)information going around.
Given where we’re at, something needs to give or we’ll just continue to spiral. This report is a great micro-example of how environmental stimulus affects drastic action.
If Netflix was oblivious about that when they were working on the show, there was plenty of chance to become aware if they paid attention to the outcry before the show came out.
An analogy: I have some fairly severe sinus issues. I'm working with professionals to figure it out. In the meantime, I'm regularly told to "treat the symptoms." At first, this was really frustrating! I wanted to solve the root problem, not just take pain meds and decongestants for the rest of my life! But the reality is, we may never figure out the root problem, or the root problem may turn out to be intractable. In the meantime, I can significantly improve my quality of life by simply doing what can be done: treating the symptoms.
At the risk of being facetious: we don't stop preparing for hurricanes just because we can't stop their root cause.
Every day we delay making hard choices because we want to wait for a root cause solution is another day we allow the root illnesses more time to inflict damage on us and our society.
> used as reasons to limit constitutional freedoms
The implicit assumption in your statement appears to be that constitutional amendments are invalid/ineffective. But that's far from the truth as its a man made artifact and reflects the beliefs and biases of its times which may or may not hold true in the present.
The US is an extreme outlier in terms of gun homicide in the first world, is the assumption that every country except the US has solved lonely/sad/broken people?
The second amendment (the full reading of it) doesn't give carte blanch coverage to own firearms and the US populace agrees that, for instance, inmates in prison and domestic abusers shouldn't be given firearms. There are sane ways to limit the second amendment.
Defenders of the second amendment often say it's an opposition to tyranny, but I fail to see how a hand-gun will help to protect you against an Abrams wielded by a tyrannous government - or should tanks, jets and battleships be objects that private citizens should be able to purchase and own for self-defense?
You could say the same thing for the 1st amendment for individuals vs large media companies. Individuals will always be weaker than well organized, better funded groups. It's impossible to know what would happen in the event of a modern civil war, but it's conceivable that the military would fracture.
As far as reading the 2nd amendment, I have been arguing lately that the "well regulated militia" should mean that gun owners should be required to attend militia training at least once a year, and if you don't, your weapons must be stored in an armory instead of at home. Something more akin to the Swiss system. Having to attend some classes would greatly reduce the number of people that would bother keeping guns at home I think, and would allow others to identify people with mental health issues. I would argue that right now we don't have a "well regulated militia" in any sense.
If the militia was self organized and this came with a relaxation of all the other gun regulations, I'd be all for it! 'destructive devices' would be rather useful in any sort of real insurgent campaign, but are basically banned for civilian ownership today.
But that's not what "well regulated" meant, and I suspect you know that.
But it's not nearly as extreme an outlier when it comes to homicide, which is what should be compared. I don't care how someone killed me, I care that they killed me.
And when you start comparing demographic groups, the gap between the US and Europe goes down even more. (Approximately half of the total US homicide rate is African Americans killing other African Americans. This is a major problem, but also says that perhaps gun ownership rates are not always the primary factor here. After all, African American gun ownership rates are about 2/3rds that of caucasian ownership in the US)
> Defenders of the second amendment often say it's an opposition to tyranny, but I fail to see how a hand-gun will help to protect you against an Abrams wielded by a tyrannous government - or should tanks, jets and battleships be objects that private citizens should be able to purchase and own for self-defense?
Vietnam. Afghanistan.
Suppressing insurgents with small arms is really damn hard. It'd be even harder in the continental US, since there wouldn't really be a "home" to rotate back to. Not a safe one, at least.
And, yes, we should _also_ focus on the lonely/sad/broken people.
It's the difference between a ruggedly handsome cowboy and a diseased lung on your pack of smokes.
They like videos of chaos and screaming.
They like their photo shown.
They don't like stories about the victims that make the victims seem like they're human. What they were doing before the shootings, things they did with their lives, etc.
They don't like stories about the community itself that aren't just about the event (shooting).
I noticed NPR does a lot of stories about the the victims.
Nothing should be legally restricted, but I think news orgs can do their job 100% and still participate in a potentially helpful manner. To be clear there is no science that says doing any of these things reduce any amount of shooting or such, but it seems like a reasonable theory that if they see shootings result in coverage they don't like, it might discourage them if they think they won't get what they want.
I suspect there are exceptions.
Also due to the number of people available for study I have to think certainly possible that things aren't as the study implied.
If you take that away, there is not much "glory" or "legacy" left behind, which certainly would discourage a giant chunk of shooters.
Note: I watched the first season of that show, thought it was terrible, and was told that the second season was even worse. The writers should have presented the topic in a better and more mature way, but they ended up doing a poor job of it. While I believe that the show should not be banned and creators should not be held responsible for it (for many reasons, with the main two being the overreach of censorship and freedom of speech; it is a work of fiction, after all), I do believe that the coverage of shootings and similar events by the mainstream media should be somewhat regulated/normalized. Whether it happens through a carrot (news self-regulating themselves) or stick (gov-t imposed regulations) is up to them, but I would much rather prefer them take the carrot.
If you're going to kill someone, actually take a person's life, the way mass shooters do, you can't possibly feel like that person is human. It's probably different for, say, a one off killing where it's more personal, or a serial killer who's projecting. But a cowardly shooter walking around killing people, they've completely convinced themselves the people they're killing aren't people, aren't human, are just targets.
Thresholds of violence: How school shootings catch on, by Malcolm Gladwell https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/19/thresholds-of-...
Gladwell interviewed about the article on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition: https://www.npr.org/2015/10/13/448182623/how-riots-may-help-...
I googled that query because I remember hearing it from the On the media podcast.
You're forced to wear seatbelts for safety reasons, why shouldn't you be forced to keep killers anonymous.
Free speech is a natural right enshrined in our Constitution, and it’s not “obviously broken”. It’s a fundamental principle of our country.
Journalist must be free to report. Now, they could certainly be more responsible, as in this case - but it’s not the governments prerogative to make them so.
That's not "broken" just because you don't like it. We chose a different path from the broken European model.
You are aware that our founding fathers had the benefit of all that thousands of years of experience to inform how they created our form of government, right?
This isn't true. I can still remember the bloodied face of a woman I saw struck by a train. I remember the pedastrian strikes I've seen whenever I ride past the location or go through the station.
If I jump in front of a train I can delay tens of thousands of people. I'm wasting several person years of other people's time. I might get in the news just for that.
The train engineer will remember that moment for the rest of their life. So will the people who saw my jump. And the maintenance man who has to clean my blood and guts off the train will also remember.
I've had a similar situation, but with the total opposite experience. The entire town had railed around the event.
But doesn't all media do that for the most part? I mean, most people are looking for escapism.
It's particularly galling that they do it with suicide, but it's what people want:
1- Movies/TV glamorizes violence from gangsters/mob/police/army... or they demonize it.
2- Movies glamorize drinking/smoking/taking drugs... or they demonize it.
3- Movies glamorize casual sex/strip clubs... or they demonize it.
4- Movies glamorize college... or they demonize it.
5- Movies glamorize having money... or they demonize it.
6- Movies glamorize 'justice' (criminal justice, etc)
I think the series is an insult to everyone who has been exposed to a suicide in their life, but I think that applies to many points. The guy who spent 15 years in jail falsely convicted won't appreciate the BS that is CSI. Just like the guy who is a recovering alcoholic, the ex-stripper, the person who lived real life violence like war, etc.
Whenever something bothers me, and this series bothers me plenty, I look within and why it bothers me. Why other things that might be similar don't. It really helps me understand our shared humanity.
People should be taught to be skeptical of bad thoughts and understand how chaotic the brain can act. Otherwise random thoughts can materialize into fixations and be re-enforced by biases.
Life is hard, it occasionally gets you down but thinking bad thoughts doesn’t make you “sick”, it just makes you human.
I'm extremely skeptical. I don't know how many ways they carved up the data before they found a segment of the population with increased suicide rates at the right time. Also, the show is about a girl who kills herself, but the female rate of suicide didn't increase enough to be considered statistically significant. Lastly, the spike in suicides starts in March, which is a month before the show was released. Their claim only makes sense if you think that watching the trailer is enough to trigger suicides.
and they still reported 9 different categorizations (overall/male/female * 3 age groups), and could only find one with a change. it isn't clear to me if they corrected for the multiple comparisons they did report.
i understand that and i don't believe i contradicted you, rather i was emphasizing: they _admitted_ to 9 different carvings and only got 1 interesting one. what they did under the hood had to be even worse!
Look at their graph of monthly data.
https://i.imgur.com/mc8PJW8.png
You can't draw any conclusion from that but that it is an overall increasing trend with cyclic tendencies by season.
March prior to the release in the end of March was already all time high rate of suicides.
"Table 1. Association Between the Release of 13 Reasons Why and Suicide in the United States, by Age Group"
I mean ... it's just stupid. The series' premiere date is also a arbitrary point in time.
I don't refute that the series might have increased the suicide rate, but I have no idea how to verify that or put a estimate on it. The authors surely don't know either.
>The scary thing is that both this article and the example you cited are used as reasons to limit constitutional freedoms
I have watched the series. I wonder why males saw a significant increase in suicides if the show revolved around a female suicide. And, yes, I understand they didn't find direct causation.
There explanation at the end was refreshing.
"While compelling, this research had several limitations. For example, the study used a quasi-experimental design, meaning that the researchers cannot make a causal link between the release of “13 Reasons Why” and the observed changes in suicide rates. The researchers cannot, therefore, rule out the possibility that unmeasured events or factors influenced suicide rates during this period."
Edit - as for why there were more male suicides linked to this show, one reason for male suicides in western countries is the increasing marginalisation of men (whereas in countries with more female suicides or a more equal ratio, women are highly marginalised). If the show glorifies suicide as a way to gain more attention and de-marginalise the individual, it makes sense that more young men would do it.
Men are what, 10x more successful in suicide attempts? It's quite the discrepancy.
Male suicide rate is somewhere between 3 to 5 times higher than female suicide rate in the US. Globally, males are ~2x more likely.
Note that women are also ~20% more likely to see health professionals.
What's the source behind that, particularly how do they count "try," e.g. is it self-reported or based on emergency services dispatched?
Does something like sitting in your closet with a 12GA in your mouth for 30 minutes only to emerge unscathed, to never speak of it again count as a try?
> Although females attempt suicide at a higher rate, they are more likely to use methods that are less immediately lethal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_differences_in_suicide#...
Attempting suicide has very different meanings for men and women. All too often the "but women try more!" is a what-about-the-womens attempt to distract from a very real, distinctly male problem.
It seems likely that men are less likely to talk about it afterwards too, which might be complicating
As someone who didn't watch the series: perhaps the story is male-oriented, even if the character is a woman?
As an example: imagine that you take the movie John Wick, redo the movie shot-by-shot and line-by-line with a woman replacing Keanu Reeves, and call it "Jean Wick". I bet it would still appeal to the exact same demographic.
The Werther Effect was well known, from inception, filming and publishing, the concerns seem to have been brushed aside. I really can't see how the studio, netflix and the producers can reject the blame for the induced suicides.
The show distinctly glorifies suicide, playing on the emotional issues and need for acknowledgment of teenagers.
Responsibility does not vanish if the effects are indirect or abstract.
"We produced the show true to the book." is no defense at all and there is a higher moral standard if you sell a product to children still.
>"While suicide rates for females increased after the show’s release, the increase was not statistically significant."
instead of
>"Suicide rates for females did not increase significantly after the show's release."
?
I have seen this quite often and it always seems a bit misleading to me.
Edit: I should have written the 2nd version as "No statistically significant increase in [...] was found". My point is not about the difference between "significance" and "statistical significance" but about mentioning an effect, while also saying the effect is not statistically significant. If it's not statistically significant, why mention it?
Statistical significance and a significant increase aren't the same. A statistically significant increase might be totally insignificant, and for a small enough study, a subjectively "significant" increase might be statistically insignificant.
You can have a 1% increase (which is not a "significant" increase) but with a large enough sample size you can be quite confident in it (statistically significant).
The latter is potentially-misleading. One might think that the rate did not increase at all, when in fact it did, or that it did not increase "a lot" (the colloquial understanding of significant). "Statistically-significant" is a keyword with technical meaning.
The former could mean that the rate increased by 2±2 units. A more-precise study might show that the rate did increase, or it might not. All we know from the former is that the rate increased, but that the rate was not statistically-significant.
However, I would argue that the original text is also misleading, because if the result wasn't statistically significant, there's no evidence that rates for females increased. If anything, the first option could perhaps say "While suicide rates for females IN THE STUDY increased after the show's release, the increase was not statistically significant, so we have no evidence that it's a real effect."
That's not quite right. A conclusion of no statistical significance is not a conclusion that there is no evidence to support the hypothesis, but that there is insufficient evidence.
The study failed to disprove the null hypothesis, but "failure to disprove" does not prove it to be true either. A more powerful study (with a larger sample size, or one that includes this incident in a meta-study of similar media events) might be able to use this data to support a positive conclusion.
All polls and samplings have an amount of error (e.g. Biden leading in the polls at 30%, 3% margin of error). If Biden polls at 32% next week, there was an increase. Colloquially some would say that's a significant increase (after all, his pie grew by 6% compared to the prior week!), but it's very likely to do with chance. Unless you survey the entire population, you don't know the true proportion in which something occurs.
A change from 30% to 35% is quite unlikely to be random chance.
1. It's an observational, retrospective study.
2. The control analysis is dubious, and its unclear if the control analysis was selected in advance.
2. It's an astonishingly high effect size.
3. They do numerous sub-group analyses without any indication that such analyses were pre-registered, and apparently without doing any multiple-comparisons corrections (e.g. bonferroni).
3. From the article: "The observed suicide rate for March 2017 — the month prior to the release of “13 Reasons Why” — was also higher than forecast. The researchers note that the show was highly promoted during the month of March, exposing audiences to the show’s premise and content through trailers. The researchers did not find any significant trends in suicide rates in people 18- to 64 years of age."
We're being asked to believe not only that the show itself can have this huge effect, but that the trailer can too. But only among males in a certain age group.
This stinks.
I'm not going to say that media doesn't play a part, but this is mostly a symptom of an inadequate mental health system and a disfunctional society that provides no sense of community/cohesion. Many of us are painfully alone and directionless. We come from broken homes and experience neglect and abuse in childhood.
Pointing the blame at a TV show just feels insulting.
"13 Reasons Why" was a show about the suicide of a young girl and was primarily aimed at a young female audience. If the studies numbers were primarily driven by an increase in suicides among young males, the causation implied seems rather dubious.
Can't they? Who's to say they weren't more influenced because the protagonist was female? The show still had a significant male viewership rate of 35%. That's not the majority, but it isn't small either.
The show would have to a have an inordinately, disproportionately, strong impact on males to cause almost a 29% increase in male suicides, but a non statistically significant increase in female suicides with that viewership distribution.
LA Times article criticising the study[1]:
> While no variations in the suicide rate were found for people ages 18-64, the rate among people ages 10 to 17 increased by 28.9% in April 2017, the month after the series debuted, the study said. It was also up significantly in June and December of that year, and was higher than expected in March 2017, when the show was heavily promoted. The April 2017 rate was the highest in the five-year period that was studied.
> Outside events include things such as the much-covered suicides of Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell in May 2017 and Chester Bennington of Linkin Park in July of that year, and the death of musician Tom Petty by accidental overdose that October, Moutier says. Also, former NFL star Aaron Hernandez died by suicide in April 2017. […]
> Here’s how a 28.9% increase can also be described as a “weak association,” according to Moutier: The overall suicide rate of boys 10-17 is actually very low, she says, around 0.6 per 100,000 people. Therefore, any change could be seen as significant change.
Guest column from the executive producer of the show[2]:
> However, the research failed to substantiate the author's own hypothesis: that when the show launched on March 31, 2017, young females would be most affected, because it's a girl whose suicide is depicted onscreen. In fact, there was no increase in suicide rates for adolescent girls that spring — and for boys the increase started before the show even launched. As you can see from the chart below, which is based on the same government data, suicide counts for adolescent girls over the last decade have been much more stable than for boys, which have risen consistently. The highest recorded month for girls was November 2016, well before anyone had ever watched 13 Reasons Why.
[1]: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/la-et-st-13-reasons...
[2]: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/13-reasons-why-c...
In kinda a cyclic issue, the problem is that depressed people need to sorrounded them selves with happy people to talk to, consume more positive media,etc.
Otherwise you end up feeding your own depression, producing and consuming more depressive content and comments with others.
To anyone facing depression : Please talk to a therapist, and consider avoiding needlessly negative communities/media. Sorrounding yourself with depressing things won't help.
Edit: this is to an extent only. Burying yourself in an extremely negative place does make things worse if you spend too much time there or go in too deep
But for me that made me feel worse. I'm financially stable, decently intelligent, have been given a great start at life, etc. yet I can't go to the grocery store without having a panic attack? How pathetic is that? On paper I should have nothing to complain about - but the depression SAID NO.
So I definitely understand how you feel. It's kinda like how if you just broke up with somebody serious, watching a makeout scene in a movie would just suck.
It's useful to talk to someone who's understanding; perhaps someone who's been through, or has experienced someone else going through, similar issues.
It's not useful to fall into a community full of broken people who don't know how to help each other.
I was loosely involved in the production of this show. I didn't find out about it until after our contribution was finished.
If I had known what content we were working on I would voiced my concern. I'm deeply ashamed I had anything to do with this and if I had known, I wish I could have verbalized my objection and voiced concern over being affiliated with the reckless disregard the production staff has for a leading cause of death among people in America that has taken the lives of friends and family.
I get that's its an effective (though artistically blunt) plot device but I would prefer that it be used less.
In the same way that those sponsored scenes already did to smoking and drinking trends. Bad driving styles, attraction to martial art etc.
https://www.jaacap.org/article/S0890-8567(19)30288-6/fulltex...
https://www.jaacap.org/article/S0890-8567(19)30288-6/pdf
which combined with sci-hub, gets you full text.
There is even a term for that "Werther Effekt"
https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/16/20696151/13-reasons-why-n...