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Comment by isthisreality | Hacker News Reader

Comparatively speaking, at least gender-wise, this data should be taken with a grain of salt.

Males are historically more effective at killing themselves. This data only looks at ED visits and you don't go to the hospital when you're clearly dead. And if you assume "suicide attempt" is using the technical definition [1], they're only looking at ED visits where the patient did not die.

Males aged 15 to 24 were 4x as likely to succeed in killing themselves in 2019. [2]

[1]: https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide (see Definitions)

[2]: https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide (see Figure 2)

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I'm not clear on what you're arguing. In Year 2019 there are N suspected suicide attempt visits for females; in Year 2020, there are 1.506N attempted visits for females. Regardless of comparing males-to-females, the year-on-year comparison is valid, unless you can make a convincing argument that there's been an abrupt change in the method/effectiveness of suicide that females are using.

In terms of comparing male to female, the comparison is still valid as well, assuming that males haven't gotten more successful than they were last year. Assuming that males are successful some proportion of the time, P, if that proportion hasn't changed, a bump of 3.7% in their total number of failures should give a general indication of the trend. If you'd take a position like "a 3.7% increase in failed attempts was accompanied by a 30% increase in successful attempts," you'd have to support the argument for why they're not only committing more suicide, but why it's more effective than it was before. That's hardly where occam's razor falls.

Yet did the successful suicide rate in males increase to compensate? It seems like you have a duty, out of politeness, to at least address whether you attempted to address this.

Bringing up makes suicide rates vs female without trying to address if that explains a 50v3% increase in attempts isn’t very helpful, or interesting.

Maybe instead of complaining, you can look it up yourself and contribute the data to this thread.

I thought about that, but it’s the duty of the person bringing it up. I don’t want to spend my time fixing the mistakes of others when it’s outside my direct interest.

My hope was to encourage the parent commenter to add some basic data to their worst.

EDIT: I find it gross that some people always want to take over a discussion about women and make it about men.

Not quite. I'm saying that the Male % and Female % should not be compared as-is.

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