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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

The thing I take away from comparaison of suicide rates between countries is, to put it bluntly, some cultures suck. Or, more specifically, some cultures are pretty awful for the people actually living in them.

South Korea has a strong economy, is conquering the entertainment world, and is a place of technological marvels. They also have 5% of deaths by suicide, compared to Greece with 0.5%, whose economy collapsed a decade ago. Not to mention SK has the lowest birthrates in the world.

I feel strongly we need policy makers to move away from GDP growth as the primary marker of national health.

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When looking at the numbers, you may want to take consideration the cultural acceptability of suicide. There are cultures where suicide is not viewed the same way, and therefore it may be elevated. Certain philosophies view it as an acceptable decision if someone has suffered greatly and doesn’t wish to anymore (off the top of my head, some stoic philosophers have spoken about it). I haven’t done my research on the topic, but isn’t it somewhat acceptable to kill yourself in Japan in certain circumstances? The taboo factor in other countries likely drives the numbers down as many people won’t entertain the idea because it is “bad”.

The point is, I’m not sure “some cultures suck” is the only part of the equation. We also need to consider how that culture educated their society about suicide.

To add data to this, Japan was similar to South Korea in 1996 (both around 2%) but by 2017 South Korea's share of deaths from suicide is 5.08% vs. Japan's 2.1% and USA's 1.71%. From my understanding, culturally Japan and South Korea are similar, please someone correct me if I am wrong.

I don't know specifics re South Korea and Greece but I wouldn't be surprised if what counts as suicide in one country might count as accident or unknown cause of death in another which makes comparisons a bit tricky.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_views_on_suicide

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seppuku

And that is a big difference - Christianity views suicide as disgraceful, punishable, and cowardly. Seppuku on the other hand is honorable and courageous. I've also heard of older Japanese committing suicide to ease burdens on the next generation. I would imagine just this difference in perspective would lend itself to very different rates all else being equal.

While this is maybe a bit too bluntly worded and one-sided, I still think that the general issue - prioritising GDP growth over happiness - is important, so I'm unhappy with the downvotes.

But why?

When making bold statement make an effort to give a reasoning behind it.

is there really much reasoning needed to state that life is more important than GDP?

Economic activity ought to exist to facilitate human flourishing, humans shouldn't be instrumentalized to build paperclip factories.

I wonder if there is a correspondence with patriarchal culture. Where there are strong expectations on men to play a certain role in society, and failure to do so is a big unrecoverable hit to status.

I was quite sad to hear of the Mayor of Seoul's death. It was interesting the difference in approach to reporting about it in the english language Korean media. I am used to reports not even mentioning that the death was by suicide anymore.

What do you mean by patriarchy? If you mean traditional gender roles, what about country that have strong gender roles, but a fairly low suicide gender ratio such as india and china?

I guess in the case of Korea, patriarchy would be something influenced by past confucian culture. This would place a patriarchal figure as the head of a household responsible interfacing that household with society.. India is a far more heterogeneous nation, so any aggregated national data would require more detail to correlate with cultures. China has a lot of political intervention into culture in this area, for example pushes to have the state take on the role of the family, and possibly with their demographic imbalance, there are a lot of men who can never have families, so there is less pressure about failure in that sense? I really have no idea.

China's state doesn't take the role of the family afaik. The state is pretty laissez-faire until something global comes up.

Also I don't think the men to female ratio being higher is that significant in aggregated data. It was like at most 120% vs SK which is ~100%. I don't think it would effect the gender suicide ratio that much. I'd even assume having more male competition pushes them to be more valuable to women i.e. more stress.

I don't know much about indian culture.

If you live in a society that has stopped you from experiencing most things that suck. Think boredom, Hunger, insecurity. Is it any surprise that when something that sucks that we can't prevent - rejection, death, loss - happens it hits these people worse than it would people who haven't had the preventable sucks taken away?

I can ensure you that Greek culture sucks too, probably way more than South Korea.

Yeah, even non Greeks know this is B.S., lol. During the crisis, everyone just still did what they always did: smoke their cigarettes and have their coffee at the cafenio, and say "eh, ti tha kanome?" which is kind of like shrugging your shoulders and going "well, not much we can do about it right now, might as well enjoy the day"

Interesting broad look but what if Greeks die from lack of hospital care more ? (non biased question, I have no agenda)

> comparaison of suicide rates between countries is,

Go careful, a lot of them count deaths in very different ways. Some of them even change the way they count death, and so you need to be careful if you're comparing rates across time for one country.

In the UK:

> The previous National Statistics definition of suicide includes deaths from intentional self-harm (where a coroner has given a suicide conclusion or made it clear in the narrative conclusion that the deceased intended to kill themselves) and events of undetermined intent (mainly deaths where a coroner has given an open conclusion) in people aged 15 and over.

[...]

> In 2016, the suicide definition was revised to include deaths from intentional self-harm in children aged 10 to 14. Previously we did not include suicides in young children due to the very small numbers involved (see Table 3). However, after discussions with Public Health England and the constituent countries of the UK, it was decided that it was appropriate to include them. Deaths from an event of undetermined intent in 10- to- 14-year-olds are not included in these suicide statistics, because although for older teenagers and adults we assume that in these deaths the harm was self-inflicted, for younger children it is not clear whether this assumption is appropriate.

So, death after self harm, even if there's no evidence of intent to die.

In the US: https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/Self-Directed-Vio...

> Suicide

> Death caused by self-directed injurious behavior with any intent to die as a result of the behavior.

But it's a bit more complicated:

> Despite the large volume of data on certain types of SDV, the utility and reproducibility of the resulting information is sometimes questionable. Mortality data are problematic for several reasons: geographical differences in the definition of suicide and how equivocal cases are classified; jurisdictional differences in the requirements for the office of coroner or medical examiner affecting the standard of proof required to classify a death as a suicide; and differences in terms of the extent to which potential suicides are investigated to accurately determine cause of death.18

https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/suicideTechnicalP...

> Gathering ongoing and systematic data is important for prevention efforts. However, it is also important to gather data that are uniform and consistent across systems. Consistent data allow public health and other entities to better gauge the scope of the problem, identify high-risk groups, and monitor the effects of prevention programs and policies. Currently, it is common for different sectors, agencies, and organizations to employ varying definitions of suicidal ideation, behavior, and death that can make it difficult to consistently monitor specific outcomes across sectors and over time. For example, the manner in which deaths are classified can change from one jurisdiction to another, and can change based on local medical and/or medico-legal standards.4 CDC’s uniform definitions and recommended data elements for self-directed violence provide a useful framework to help ensure that data are collected in a consistent manner across surveillance systems.

[...]

You're going to need a way less hot take than "some cultures suck".

Maybe "religion and family formation is associated with less suicide", or "inequality is associated with suicide", or "cultural norms play a role in suicide". Not to get too social justice warrior, but saying "some cultures suck" is such a thought-terminating cliche that it gets you nowhere.

This can be difficult when there is such massive cultural diversity around the world. You can't just explain variance of global suicide rates by just one variable like inequality or religion. Saying "some cultures suck" is sussinct and encapsulates all the variables that go into the issue.

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