Suicide is rarely about true despair, I would say it is more about loss of purpose. When you are scrounging to get by or have bigger fish to fry than some existential demons, suicide falls to the back of your mind. When there is time to ponder bigger questions it returns.
Suicide rates are strongly linked to socioeconomic status. Being in the 1st decile for income gives you a more than double risk than being in the 10th decile (and the risk is still higher among even poorer people).
Article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S091750401...
Most relevant graph: https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S09175040173003...
Suicide rates fluctuate wildly over time though, so trying to understand suicide by looking at relative rates within a given year is going to give you at best an incomplete picture.
Take a look at all countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...
Suicide is not mainly determined by absolute poverty. That doesn't mean that socioeconomic factors or financial ruin are irrelevant but it questions the idea that suicide is mainly about material circumstances.
It's plausible that absolute poverty would be the main factor in suicide, i.e. privation and resulting suffering would drive people to suicide. Though plausible, that doesn't seem to be the case, which is interesting.
Glancing at the data on wikipedia, there seem to be cultural and religious factors at play here that dwarf economic factors (not to mention sex...). Muslim countries have low rates of suicide. Japan and Korea have high rates of suicide. It's totally fine to look for correlations along economic lines but that's a lot more to the story and it isn't wrong to bring that up.
As far as poverty goes, I don't see any reason at all that absolute poverty should mean anything. Again, my buying power isn't materially affected by that of people in Europe, for instance, but my buying power certainly has a huge absolute effect on my quality of life. I would expect the effect of poverty on suicide rates to be stronger per country than worldwide for this reason, and also that what is considered poor in the United States would be unimaginably rich in some countries.
And, those cultural factors are precisely what makes it difficult to compare across countries. The amount of statistical adjustment you'd have to do to compare across even 10 countries would probably swamp most of the non-cultural effects is my guess.
Uh, they're all humans?
> As far as poverty goes, I don't see any reason at all that absolute poverty should mean anything. Again, my buying power isn't materially affected by that of people in Europe, for instance, but my buying power certainly has a huge absolute effect on my quality of life. I would expect the effect of poverty on suicide rates to be stronger per country than worldwide for this reason, and also that what is considered poor in the United States would be unimaginably rich in some countries.
If you don't think it's plausible that abject suffering would lead someone to suicide I don't know what to say.
You only want to talk about "purchasing power" but my whole point is that there are lots of other factors. You can talk about purchasing power but you shouldn't dismiss people talking about those other factors.
> And, those cultural factors are precisely what makes it difficult to compare across countries. The amount of statistical adjustment you'd have to do to compare across even 10 countries would probably swamp most of the non-cultural effects is my guess.
...and personality differences make it difficult to compare across individual humans. None of these studies are controlling for all relevant factors, most of which are probably unknown or at least unmeasured.
As far as abject suffering goes, I agree, that probably doesn't help the suicide rate. But, what I've been getting at is this: you keep referring to "absolute poverty," and I'm telling you I don't think "absolute poverty" is it. I think it's plain old poverty, which is relative poverty, which has to do with what one's local purchasing power is.
"Abject suffering" is relative, too. What you might call "abject suffering," someone in another country might just call "Tuesday." Conversely, someone used to living very well who ends up losing everything financially might feel extreme despair. Think 2008, or 1929.
In other words, add all those cultural factors on, and what an American might want to end it all over, a Pakistani (to pick a random example) might not. If you did a study with 10 countries, then you'd have 45 pairs to consider, and, like I said, that gets messy quickly.
This is roughly why I suspect there aren't any good studies that do what you suggest. Almost all the studies of this nature concentrate on a single country, and I suspect it's because the research itself would be difficult, but, also that it would be extremely tough to make any cross-cultural conclusions, which is what you want to do if you want to know what makes "humans" want to kill themselves.
I don't agree that all suffering is relative. I don't believe that Pakistanis experience starvation less severely than Americans. Maybe human suffering is relative to being a human.
I understand that you think relative poverty causes suicide. That's not important to my argument which (following from the original commenter's) is "there are other interesting variables that affect suicide besides relative poverty".
You keep bringing up how culture is hard to control for. But a study of only South Korea doesn't control for culture. The correlation between relative poverty and suicide is probably higher in SK for cultural reasons (which is, of course, why SK was chosen). My point is that culture (among other things) is an interesting factor in suicide. It could be studied too. It's fine to look for the effect of relative poverty within a country but it's also interesting to look for other things, like culture and absolute poverty and levels of industrialization.
Science is imperfect. If you don't like the results that science has told us, you can claim the opposite and you can believe the opposite, citing exceptions, as you have done.
But, that doesn't make the opposite true. You can provide your evidence also (in my personal opinion, a link to Wikipedia doesn't count as evidence).
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/financial-hardship...
I'm sure there are many other factors and it's hard to point at any one as a real, root cause, but I don't think that existential dread or ennui or whatever you name it is the root cause either.
As an aside, if I were a poor, suicidal person, I'd probably take extreme issue with your comment as somehow implying that I'm not 'doing being suicidal right' or something like that, since I'm apparently being suicidal when I should be thinking about my three part-time jobs. (I'm not, I don't take personal offense, I'm just expressing how I suppose someone might see this mentality, and how it could be seen as insensitive. Although, these people do have bigger problems than internet comments, and any kind of correction here wouldn't fix that.)
Maybe they’re not?
It doesn't matter if it is "rarely associated"... Among millions of people, do you think the association will be positive or negative?