Japan and South Korea see surge of suicides among young women

Is it really? Male suicide increased 20% yoy, which is significant but… female suicide increased 80%. That is much more worrying if it's a trend.

All suicide prevention focuses on middle aged men because that's the highest risk group, but they don't ignore other groups.

If their life was going poorly before that, it sure won't be better after.

The record of this could follow you around for life as well.

I understand this is considered conventional wisdom to recommend these help lines but I really think you should rethink that.

I've been around for a while now, and it's an indisputable fact in my mind that men cope far better with loneliness than women. From seeing friends and strangers in my personal life, to less tangible understandings of evolutionary pressures and general rates of extroversion/introversion between women and men, it's frankly odd to me that such an uncontroversial statement could give anyone pause.

When talking about suicide we have roughly 3 different definitions.

1) That used by coroners or medical examiners. This is normally a tight definition that will exclude some deaths. It's often along the lines of "the deceased ended their life and intended to do so". Sometimes that has to be proved to a high standard. (EG, in England until very recently it had to be shown "beyond all reasonable doubt").

2) That used by national statistics organisations. These will use causes of death mentioned on death certificates and then try to code the cause of death using ICD10, and then combine these with coroners inquests. These tend to be robust and accurate, although you need to understand what coding they use and when the deaths happened.

Both of these tend to have lags in. The first needs to wait for coroners to hold an inquest. The second needs to wait for all the data to be sent in and coded and compiled.

The 3rd definition is much broader. It takes real time data from police, hospital, and coroners (but before an inquest has happened). It's sometimes called "real time monitoring" data. Because it uses data from coroners before inquests have happened it sometimes avoids the word suicide and uses phrases like "suspected self-inflicted deaths" instead. We use this data to in suicide prevention when looking at frequently used locations or emerging clusters.

Maybe the writer used Bing to proof his argument.

Sometimes the answer isn't another stupid app.

While I understand you're trying to be helpful, what you need to understand is that suicidal ideation and "feeling rejected by your society" are not synonymous. There can be a relationship, sure- but suicide, by and large, comes from a mentality where the victim legitimately believes they will not ever be happy enough in the future to counter-balance the pain that's consuming them in the present. In their despair, they truly believe that suicide is the only way they can end the suffering. In their minds, this is quite literally their only hope. To say that this is caused by feeling rejected by society is extremely narrow, so please be aware of that.

This having been said, trying to begin a relationship while in the throes of depression is not a good idea. If you can't love yourself, it sows the seeds for a highly unhealthy dependent or codependent relationship- even someone who isn't actively considering ending their life can't thrive like that.

Finally, consider this: let's say the person using this app is indeed suicidal because they feel like they've been rejected by society- dating apps are infamous for short-lived relationships, rejection, and predatory subscription models (search hn and you will find any number of threads discussing this last one). Even if this is a truly altruistic service without a predatory subscription model, what do you think someone who is in the depths of despair will do if they're rejected by a community that markets itself as a haven for the rejected? If they weren't at the very edge of suicide before, how much closer did they just get pushed?

In short, be aware that there's a fair bit more going on than "maybe they feel lonely." I suspect this approach would do more harm than good.

They might not be great at addressing it yet, but they do know it's a problem.

lmao

If that truly were the case, it would show up clearly in excess mortality. Yet AFAIK it does not, which would be evidence for japan as a whole not having bundled its covid response, at least nowhere near as much as europe or the US.

Now, this may not be due to Japan's government; more plausibly, there is a higher level of pre-existing resistance to the virus, since all the nations of east Asia (including Australia and New Zealand) are doing better than all the nations of western Europe. But it doesn't point towards an especially bungled response.

> There’s a three day lag in the data

Do you truly need deaths as they happen by the minute?

We should envy them, not drag them down to our level.

A correct response based on evidence.