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Comment by fxtentacle | Hacker News Reader

Clickbait?

The number went up from 1500 last year to 2100 this year, so not a strong increase in absolute terms.

And the only reason why that's more than the Coronavirus deaths is because they have managed the pandemic quite well so far, like - it seems - most Asian countries do.

To put things into perspective, the monthly suicides in Japan from all reasons combined is about the same number as 4% of the monthly US coronavirus deaths.

So while sad, Japan increasing their suicide rate by about 0.005% of their population per year sounds like a good tradeoff against risking a >1% death rate.

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That was just for one month though. 1500 last october vs 2100 this October. 2100 is a 40% increase over 1500. That's a pretty drastic change especially when the trend was downward.

If you focus on the absolute rate, going from 0.002% to 0.005% in a year is bad, but you still have a lot of runway before it becomes the worse choice.

I mean of course the lockdown is bad for mental health. But the article (in my opinion) presents is as if Japan made a bad decision. But based on the numbers that are available, their decision was better than the alternative.

Japan never had any lockdown so not sure what alternative you're talking about. There's no decision causing this. Sounds like you defensively interpreted this as an argument against lockdowns and started downplaying the numbers for no reason at all.

They called it "state of emergency" and "government advice to avoid the 3 Cs".

It's not a full lockdown, but it clearly modified people's behavior in a way that reduced covid spread while increasing loneliness.

Hmm, I've read it as suicide is a bigger problem for them that doesn't get the attention needed than suicides spike because of x corona measures (that have been rather light weight compared to western world).

In my opinion, suicide has been a proben in Japan for a long time. It's probably the same underlying issue as Hikkomori and Grasseaters, namely that young men fail to secure their place in the economy, due to the latter being stagnant. There's also people faking their suicide so that they can live an unsuccessful life without their family publicly losing face.

Plus a typical saying is "if a nail sticks out, hit it harder" so I'm not sure you would get community consent for helping the oddballs. At least not from the elderly, most of whom feel like they were the ones who had it though when rebuilding everything after the wars... which led to insane economic growth and a boom of opportunities for them.

So not sure it's correct, but the idea that the elderly worked hard and the youngsters are just lazy is very persuasive. So problems facing the young tend to get less attention by politicians.

That is a 40% increase in absolute terms...

Uh, what? They're apparently fucking not managing the actual pandemic well since any given citizen is at a higher risk of dying of suicide than of covid...

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