Child suicides in Japan hit record high
www3.nhk.or.jp
www3.nhk.or.jp
https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide
Which looks like 5 per 100000 for 10 to 14 year olds?
The Japanese population in this age range is ~5M:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan
So at the US rate we’d except ~250 suicides in Japan if the rate was the same as the US.
Over the 12 to 15 range in Japan the article states there were 103 suicides.
The rates seem roughly comparable therefore?
It terrible that this is increasing, but it would be interesting to understand if this is unique to Japan or not.
Is this asking a question?
Edit: Today I learned the best course for a non native speaker is to not ask questions.
English was not my first language, and this peculiar phrasing confused me. Asking for clarity seems like a natural thing to do in this situation.
And as mentioned elsewhere, the entire thread seems like a good natured discussion: perhaps it felt different without the original "edit".
There is a rudeness in making it one of these faux-questions filled with implications instead of clearly stating what it is you want to say.
This sub-thread reminds me that there are many informal rules in languages that are rarely taught, and which can trip up non-native speakers. Informal shorthands, idioms, slang, etc.
1. is sincerely asking a question
2. accidentally hit they question mark key instead of the period
3. is mimicking the valley girl inflection
It's not that much of a problem here, but it's much more pronounced in places where people rarely use complete sentences to begin with. Such as chat rooms, etc.
:-) I was thinking this but couldn't find the right phrase.
It could also be expressing uncertainty. You want to make an assertion but not 100% sure you are right. A question mark at the end expresses some self doubt and leaves it open to correction. I use '?' that way quite often.
Both of your comments can be construed as linguistic pedantry. Particularly, saying "it's confusing" rather than e.g. "I find it confusing" is pretty prescriptive - and it just sounds like you're doubling down on your first comment.
If you want to ask a question about a feature of language, it helps to add the context that you're unfamiliar with the language itself. Otherwise, most readers will assume that you're attempting to correct the user you're replying to. Commenting on people's use of language is considered quite rude in most internet communities - not least because of the number of ESL users.
shortened, becomes:
I used this process, and came up with these numbers, 140 and 250, and they are kind of close?
Why you got in trouble: people thought you were criticizing the original comment for hiding a statement to look like a question. (A common underhanded tactic to do and a common criticism - "was that a question?".)
Eg:
I think I left the phone in my car.
Vs
I think I left the phone in my car?
While technically incorrect in written English, this is very common in casual speaking and has found its way into casual writing.
Rendering it in written English is not correct per formal rules, you’d probably never see this in an English textbook, but it’s a semi-common colloquialism in forums like these.
Unfortunately not. The suicide capital of the world (including teenagers) is currently South Korea:
http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20190501000216
which has the highest suicide rate among countries with a population of more than 5mln:
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/suicide-r...
South Korea is on a capitalist upswing, not decline. People forget that South Korea was worse off than most of Africa after the Korean War. Capitalism and democracy is what saved them.
Look at their brother to the North if you want to see a real decline.
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korea_under_Japanese_rule
“Capitalism” being called as a reason for success sort of also implies that there is something strong and special about Koreans in that they can make it work, where there are countless other examples of capitalistic societies leading to massive corruption - and indeed Korea has massive megacorps owned by just a few families that are de facto governments in themselves.
Ugh... I see you overlooked the small fact that the Japanese occupation of the Korean peninsula happened before the Korean War...
"After all, the South was by all standards a failed state after the Korean war (1950-53). GDP per capita in South Korea in early 1960’s was below $100. Lower than Haiti, Ethiopia or Yemen, making South Korea one of the poorest countries in the world. Infrastructure built during the Japanese occupation (1910-1945) was destroyed during the war. All of Korea’s natural resources remained in the North, as well as its industrial facilities. The first years of independence, under the presidency of Rhee Syng-man, brought no economic development and kept South Korea afloat only due to foreign aid." [0]
>“Capitalism” being called as a reason for success sort of also implies that there is something strong and special about Koreans in that they can make it work
There may be something strong and special about Koreans, but one half went capitalist, the other half went Communist/Socialist. The proof is in the pudding.
>where there are countless other examples of capitalistic societies leading to massive corruption
Being capitalist is immaterial to being corrupt.
I guess explain China vs Taiwan, which are both doing well, although that is certainly glossing over some horrible decades with the cultural revolution.
Yes, that's exactly what PP posits as the cause of these suicides.
I believe it was Malcom Kyeyune who joked that if North Korea nuked Seoul, it would be the best thing to ever happen to young people in South Korea.
The birth rate in South Korea is like 1/4th the birth rate of North Korea.
People are having less children because there is constant downwards pressure to have less children, by society, by politics, by wealth/industry.
Having a kid doesn't cost a lot in South Korea. In fact it's usually beneficial. The problem is that having a kid basically means your main source of income is vulnerable and your situation will more than likely be negatively affected.
This is how elite overproduction tends to happen. I suggest you read some of the writing on the causes and effects of EO. The Good Ol Boyz podcast has some episodes on EO in Korea that are pretty good.
If you can get into a relatively high status position by doing better than your peers in a school test, and you’re out of luck otherwise, of course many people are going to spend 16 hours a day studying for those tests.
> People are having less children because there is constant downwards pressure to have less children
Where would you say this pressure comes from and is communicated?
> Having a kid… it's usually beneficial… your situation will more than likely be negatively affected.
This seems contradictory.
Being a labourer is often highly regarded in lots of low population or first world countries. Not in Korea. Not even without significant immigration. They are just all sardines trying to squeeze into the upper jobs. No one wants to be left out and certainly doesn't consider it a career path.
>Where would you say this pressure comes from and is communicated?
Their workforce and/or lack off work stability, almost entirely.
>This seems contradictory.
If you take it out of context..... yes. But I just said that it'd be financially beneficial to have a kid. But then also introduces instability that might pull the rug underneath when your financially beneficial decision removes your larger chunk of income.
i.e. babies are very affordable, and you get benefits that aren't bad. But also this coincides with losing your job due to having a baby. It's not contradictory as they're both alternate directions. Your job is stable whilst having a baby AND you have a baby? You're benefiting. You have a baby and it ruins your income stream? Those extra savings from having a baby are cancelled out.
Also, while America has a lot of guns, there's also a lot of variance. The stats are a bit hard to compute, but there appear to be some states in the US that have fewer firearms per capita than some other countries, notably Switzerland, Canada, and Finland.
It's also worth pointing out that suicide by firearm is largely a male thing. In the United States women attempt suicide at 3x the rate that men do, but they tend to die because of that at a much lower rate (22.4 for men, 6.8 for women). The rate of completed female suicides is currently rising faster for women than men, worryingly.
It's complicated, basically.
And as always discussing suicide creates a contagion risk. If you're experiencing suicidal thoughts, please know that help is available at the national suicide prevention hotline, 800-273-8255.
For reference, nine of the top ten nations for suicide of banned civilian gun ownership. All of the top 40 nations make it difficult. USA is usually around #50 or so.
It is complicated, and even statements like ”access to firearms has been shown to affect suicide rates” are could be misleading because you could be putting the cart before the horse, if someone has chosen to kill themselves, it reasons they will chose a fast/painless, and effective tool.
[1] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29684846/
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inert_gas_asphyxiation#Suicide
On the shittiest days I see the lines of nitrogen tanks we use at work for Gas Detector calibration and remember my old buddy.
But choice of method does affect rate of death, so it's correct to say that increased access to any method that's commonly used affects the rate of death. Decreasing access to that method is valid if its one of the measures taken to reduce suicide rates.
So it's less that guns increase the rate of suicide, and more that they increase the suicide rate to suicide attempt ratio due to their efficacy. Which, similar to the point you're making, means America probably has less suicide attempts to begin with than its suicide rate would indicate relative to other countries.
Do you have a reason to imply most suicides are impulsive? I don’t think the media implies that (and my experience in New Zealand is they are not impulsive - usually following a long period of depression and maybe stated intent or attempts).
There is scientific disagreement over impulsivity, and the distinction between impulsive and planning is so blurry as to be not that useful to a non-specialist. Also my quick skim of the topic was somewhat confusing because there is a different topic about whether impulsive personalities are more likely to suicide (probably not). And my case personally I am middle aged, and my peer group appears more likely to plan, which affects my anecdotal experience.
I think my problem is that the word “impulsive” is odd. Someone who has been thinking of committing suicide for months, and then one day “suddenly” decides to go through with it, seems to be considered by the literature to have made an impulsive decision. That definition doesn’t fit my usual meaning of the word impulsive (e.g. I don’t think it makes sense to say: I have been looking at cars to buy for two months and then I impulsively bought one).
Does someone here have any experience with japanese school life? Is it really that bad? Or did they just pick a number of the worst cases?
Or even worse: blame is put on the victim.
That said, I think the deep scar analogy is apt. While therapy has helped me immensely in dealing with some of my issues, those issues will always be there, so it's hard not to feel an immense amount of regret and "if only" thoughts wishing I had never been bullied in the first place.
That doesn't surprise me at all. Back in the day 2ch, which was the forerunner of 4chan in Japan, was extremely popular, but basically just as toxic and awful as 4chan. I think in Asia generally there is a LOT of aggression online.
I'm sure there's something there, but I'm not a social scientist. Anyone with experience in sociology/psychology have an idea what that's about?
Is being successful in school good? yes. Is being successful in later life good? yes.
So you cannot consider the "successful school dropout". "risk taking" is the missed nuance, or "it has to get worse before it gets better"/"break a bone to set the leg" etc. Instead you have the only "feminist" path as (cherry-picked populations of) girls doing well in school and successes later in life, even if those don't necessarily/naturally correlate.
If you really wanted to capture that nuance, you need the kind of discussions Jordan Peterson has wrt personality/behavioural traits and their impacts on differences in outcomes; but you can clearly see how much hostility (in the name of feminism) he receives for that.
The funny thing is how he's accused of (sex/gender) essentialism, even if backed by stats/data, despite the advocated feminist alternatives being also full of essentialism (and just-so narratives), just ones seen as more culturally palatable.
I think because can be a better replacement for yet in this sentence. Repression very often leads to higher intensity.
In Asia? You haven't seen Twitter yet in the US.
Yes I have, and there is much more of a culture to be taken care of and get emotional support there than I've seen in other countries. Even British twitter is way harsher lol Americans are generally very kind and soft
You probably aren't exposed to the same kind of feed then.
Also, I think people should feel free to share whatever life experience / observations / anecdotes they have because it's not like what we write here is going to get cited in some journal.
Anyway, looks like I replied to the wrong post originally. And I botched my delivery. It was a poor attempt at encouraging more substantive discussion. I, for one, would have been interested in seeing an example that points out how much more ruthless a different country was, and I would have hoped that someone would show a counter example, and then a n interesting discussion pop up.
Good thing we wouldn't introduce such a thing in the west.
I would want to see pretty strong (non anecdotal) evidence to think otherwise.
Those stories always follow the same pattern - pick out the most extreme example of something that you can find, then spin some superficially insightful theory around it relating it to some essential difference between Japanese culture and other cultures.
There is no such thing as essential differences. And if all that reaches your attention about a faraway place is the extremes, you are bound to come to some weird conclusions.
It's just too easy to apply this recipe to anything you don't understand well. Just imagine the stories you could tell about European student culture if you started from the Belgian Reuzegom hazing story [0], and generalized from there.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reuzegom#Death_of_Sanda_Dia
Seeing all these surveys that show that the more you consume media the less you know is extremely sad. I don’t think there are any short term solutions.
Reinforcing your comment, the fallacy here is in assuming that the factors affecting suicide rates among Western children are identical to the factors for Japanese children, and therefore bullying in Japan must be particularly atrocious to cause the high baseline suicide rate.
Does it really? Do you feel the same way about western society and, say, duels to the death? The many old practices regarding marriage and the church all around?
I don't think suicide as an honorable death is any more of a real thing in Japan nowadays than ninjas are.
Considering how common a form of retribution gun violence is in the US nowadays, yes, I'd say yes.
Could there be a case to be made in comparing American school shooters and Japanese student suicides? Maybe we'd find they had similar school experiences prior to their final moments.
Yes, I would. Such societal norms don't just die, they remain in the "ether" so to speak.
For example, americans might not be as religious, or sticking with the church. They might not even be born in the US, or just be first or second generation. But the culture, and this includes immigrants as they integrate, contains all kinds of protestant ideas.
And it's easier for something like a suicide norm to survice that a practice of the duel (which takes two to survice, plus has the law against it, even if you come out alive).
Maybe not so nowadays, but you'd be surprised how often it was a solution to societal shame in Italy up to the 1950s or so...
The 'suicide for preserving honor' theory has been long abandoned & mostly outlawed, even. No one in the modern generation thinks that way. The causes for suicide are mostly due to economic imbalance & high credit/ loans/ failed businesses (sadly). Children have easy access to credit cards from family, and rack up huge debts by indulging in things as part of peer pressure. I saw several case studies highlighting this when I was part of influencer marketing business.
Ritual suicide was done by seppuku - slashing out your guts, as a final act of bravery. No one does anything remotely similar.
You can’t purge a cultural heritage—everyone in Japan learns Japanese history and ritual suicide is a notable part of that history. The point is not that people commit suicide today for the same reasons or in the same way that they did 500 years ago, but that it is more likely to be accepted as a way out than in a culture that e.g. considers suicide to be a one-way ticket to the spiritual inferno.
Not sure where you get this idea, but this is grossly inaccurate.
Japanese culture is strongly revisionist. People don't talk about the war, much less teach about it. The 'old ways' and 'samurai heroism' was faulted for the mess in '40s. People make a sigh whenever such touchy topics come up. New Japan is a different beast.
As a consequence, we are seeing a generation which is severely confused on why WW2 happened. American pop culture is embraced with open arms, but they can't explain why Hiroshima happened at the hands of US. It's all faulted to grave mistakes on the 'old thinking' which is best left behind. Japan adopted modernism & became America's best buddies, ignoring the blemishes over 3 decades of Imperial japanese horrors. Older generation, who used to teach from experience of pre-war and neo-modern Japan, are dying off due to age. A significant chapter of history is being ignored by looking the other way. Look up the editorials of any Japanese weekly, and on any random week you will find some discussion on how they bemoan the growing dissonance between the post-war values of peace & the cultural change alongside the pseudo-aggression of some political parties, which eventually aims to remilitarize Japan at some point. (That's a story for another time or another thread)
Making a generalized story from cherry-picked anecdotes is an incredibly common strategy for journalists writing about anything. Sometimes it might actually match more general trends and sometimes not; you can't say without real statistics, which in most cases don't exist or aren't accurate anyway.
No one's tracking it carefully, so who knows if bullying in Japan is actually worse or just picked up in the zeitgeist more. But it's ridiculous to pretend like Japanese school culture isn't drastically different from that of most western countries.
Everything is essetially the same with some limited number of levers being pulled a bit further: girls want to marry a little bit earlier, parents are a little bit more worried abt kids, politicians a bit more corrupt, racism is targeted at different colors in a different hierarchy, all that jazz, but all the patterns I was used to in France simply fit China very well and I didnt find it so difficult to just brush off the odd difference and adapt.
My Chinese parents in law also discovered I have the same strengths and flaws any other Chinese guy their daughter could have found :D
You're assuming you can "see" the cultural differences.
Sometimes you can easily see it, but often it's really hard to figure out, because they are going to express themselves in edge cases that you have to run into, which takes time and then it takes time to run into enough of them to be able to see a pattern.
Interestingly I experienced persistent bullying that included physical assault and mental abuse (it was always successfully passed off as a joke when they did something to me) in the French system.
It was so bad that I still relive it daily every single day now, many many years later.
No direct experience but heard stories of bullying of children of friends/colleagues living in Japan and that was scary enough.
He was forced to resign and ultimately put a lot of pressure on prime minister Suga because he was his pick. Suga had to also step down after this and other similar incidents.
https://aramajapan.com/news/cornelius-apologizes-after-bully...
My impression is that, overall, the bullying is probably not significantly worse than in other countries, but that perhaps more media attention is focused on the issue than elsewhere. There was a major moral panic in the mid-1980s about school bullying, and the media continue to report regularly on statistical trends and extreme incidents.
Anecdotally, there seems to be a lot of variation among schools. More than one public school teacher has confided to me about how different the kids are in different neighborhoods. Japan may seem homogeneous, but there’s a lot of local variation by social class. In the tougher schools, there can be fighting, stealing, and bullying, while in other schools that might be practically unknown. Private schools can be very different from public, too, and there are a lot of single-gender schools, which have their own dynamics. Certain aspects of Japanese culture, such as age-based hierarchies, may be stronger or weaker or play out differently in different types of schools as well.
In the U.S., people tend to be keenly aware of school differences, because public schools have a lot of local autonomy and are typically locally funded. In Japan, because the curriculum and many other education-related matters are determined by the Ministry of Education, there is a large degree of apparent nationwide uniformity, especially between grades one and nine. For example, in every elementary and junior-high-school classroom I have been into in Japan, and in almost all that I’ve seen in photographs, all of the desks face the front of the room and the outside windows are on the students’ left-hand side [1]. There doesn’t seem to be any similar uniformity at least in California [2], where I went to elementary school more than fifty years ago.
This apparent uniformity can give people who have experienced Japanese schools only as students the impression that whatever they happened to experience in school—a lot of bullying, say, or none at all—must be typical of the entire country.
Of course, people in other countries might overgeneralize their individual educational experiences, too.
[1] Google image search for 小学校 教室 [elementary-school classroom]
https://www.google.co.jp/search?q=%E5%B0%8F%E5%AD%A6%E6%A0%A...
[2] Google image search for elementary-school classroom California
https://www.google.co.jp/search?q=elementary-school+classroo...
That said, I'll say that bullying in Japan is different in that it is orchestrated. Peer pressure is enormous in Japan. When someone is being bullied, very few of us can raise an objection because doing so would make you the next target. So everyone is becoming an enabler. (Actually, this is not just kids' matter. It's pretty much how the whole society functions here. No wonder adults can't stop kids bullying - they're just imitating adults!)
I imagine it does happen, but more often than not at urban school, at schools that are less academically oriented (e.g., construction high schools), and overall in lower socio-economic areas. The abusers are probably from abusive families.
If you’re in the burbs or the provincial parts of Japan, bullying at this extreme level is very unlikely to happen. The more common type of bullying is verbal abuse — still bad, but not like the examples you gave.
All that said, there is a form of hazing that is common in Japan that would probably be considered abusive, and that’s with high school baseball clubs. The new players on the team sometimes get boot camp-like treatment, and some folks (and sometimes coaches) take it too far. It’s theoretically all in fun and/or character building, and there are often checks and balances in place by the senior players, but I’ve heard some stories. That said, I don’t think that there are many baseball players who would not do it again.
I sincerely believe these instances were cherry picked. If such things happened regularly, it would have made an awful amount of noise in an otherwise law abiding society. Mixed raced (hafu) children do get more bullying from anecdotal evidence, but that is more of name calling or poking some fun at visual attribute. My knowledge about the situation is limited to Tokyo & Osaka, but that is pretty much where most of the foreigners/ mixed race families are to be found.
All of these things happened to at least one person I know growing up in the US.
Many are classified as accidents and authorities are generally fine with this. Additionally, suicides are usually not reported by the media to prevent copycat suicides.
What I'm saying is that the "actual rate" of suicides is probably higher, maybe by a lot, in many countries than the official rate.
Same for Catholics and most of Christians, hence no suicide attacks.
I guess you're referring to the U.S., right?
My individual term life policy has a 2-year exclusion period, but otherwise covers suicide. I can't track down the precise reasons for this, whether its related to case law, state statutes, etc. Closest hit I found for California was Insurance Code § 11066(h), but that's for policies issued by fraternal societies. (It probably echoes some other statute or case law.) There are endless Google hits from law and insurance web sites stating this general fact.
> The results show a record-high 415 children killed themselves in the year through March. That's up nearly 100 from the previous school year.
I believe this is mirrored in other countries. The pandemic really hasn't been great for a lot of middle/high school kids.
Also: please be mindful that generally if some "obvious fault" occurs to you, it probably occurs to the people for whom this is their professional area of expertise or even life's work, their work has likely been reviewed by a number of their peers, etc. Internet discussion forum commenters are highly unlikely to be the first person to think of some flaw in their work.
I'm not saying they always will do said correction, but that if you're going to be skeptical, check to see if the correction was made instead of just dismissing or discounting the data, and be especially careful about your personal biases.
Note that such corrections might only get a passing mention because corrections for under-reporting is so common in epidemology.
Kind of sounds like projection. Depending on who you ask, it's generally understood in psychology that children raised by cold/rejecting/invalidating/selfish/abusive parents develop it to cope with having age-appropriate emotions that offend their parents. It could be perceived as a way to manipulate/convince the cold/rejecting parents into giving them what the child needs (food, attention, etc.) without feeling bad for having their age-appropriate, healthy needs - a habit that outlasts its need and stays through adulthood to the detriment of everyone. A healthy response would be to not feel bad for having feelings and, due to successfully developing self-acceptance, integrate/communicate all their emotions and rationality in a healthy way.
In this case (underage suicide) specifically, some factors would be depression and domestic violence due to mandated isolation.
Forcing abusive parents to spend time with their children, and having children who are depressed or were on the verge of depression, enter a state of desperation that could lead to suicide rates spiking.
A depressive topic in itself.
PS: Should note that these are just two of the most likely reasons for the increase in children suicide, but not the only.
* They're trying to optimize for 2 (sometimes) contradictory problems: getting the right answer AND maintaining their job/power. A random bloke on the Internet just is trying to optimize for 1 problem, getting the right answer: any other considerations like fielding off hungry young political competitors or maintaining corporate stock prices so you stay in their good graces aren't factors in the slightest to a random well-intentioned smart guy on the Internet.
* They are very smart at their field of expertise, but they're specialists and not generalists. They are very bad at considering second-order effects outside of their narrow field of expertise. Something like a lockdown in some city might indeed immediately save 1,000 extra people from a Covid death. Any risk-benefit analysis and deeper consideration of that lockdown on other problems such as drug/alcohol abuse and overdose deaths, suicides and hopelessness and depression, obesity increases leading to many health problems and deaths later on, deaths caused by missed cancer screenings and other medical problems, loss of freedom, or its economic impact and long-term impact on society isn't even a consideration by officialdom. Maybe 1,000 people are saved to kill 2,000 and cause even further societal problems. Yet those 1,000 deaths saved would be characterized as a win and proof that lockdowns work because no other factors can be considered. I'd strongly argue that a smart engineer or CEO (professions who are trained to considering multiple factors and tradeoffs in complex decision-making) would be better suited to make these kinds of complex societal decisions than a scientist focused on a narrow field.
* They're frighteningly bad at normal risk-management calculations. One could make a very reasonable argument that a normal fit 0 to 40 year old shouldn't get a new vaccine which has no long-term test data for an illness that statistically has a very low risk for them: and many people are reasonably making that risk-management calculation. Yet many experts are rushing into advocating vaccines even for children despite no long-term test data. The risk management calculation for a vaccine in this circumstance is completely different for the old and young, yet no consideration of this is allowed.
* Even when they sometimes get things right, most of what what even well-informed members of the public hear from the experts is filtered through the media. Unfortunately, outside of a handful of decent journalists who are reasonably smart and understand nuance (and who are mostly shunned from mainstream outlets) there is no collection of stupider people on the planet to try and analyze complex subjects or ask scientists real questions.
Covid is not low risk for 35-40 year olds. Someone age 25 with both vaccination doses is at higher risk of death than an unvaccinated 12 year old. How you've managed to extrapolate from this to "low risk to people up to age 40" is baffling, especially when you spend the rest of your post talking about how bad people are at understanding data.
What threshold are you using to define “low risk” ?
In my opinion, just about everyone is low risk but there is jump in numbers once the 35-40 age group is added
Science qua science can give humans all kinds of (nearly) objective information about viruses and vaccines.
A risk-management calculation is not science: that kind of decision comes down to factors such as one's own risk tolerance and projection of the risks involved and many other subjective factors, including trust. For a reasonably well-informed Covid vaccine decision, you have to weigh factors such as your personal risk from Covid and compare that to somewhat known short term potential vaccine injuries/side-effects, and unknown long-term vaccine issues.
Whether you or I personally think a vaccine is a good or bad thing for a healthy ~40 year old to take is irrelevant. If you feel safer with it, you are certainly free to take it. The point I'd like to make is that many 40 year olds can reasonably look at Covid death rates for their age group, and compare it to the known short term problems, as well as weigh the likelihood of long-term issues, and come to a sane and reasonable decision to not want to rush and take it.
For me, my big issue with the vaccines is fertility. We found out after a few years that Thalidomide caused birth-defects, as just one example in the history of medicine. Personally speaking, I think rushing to mass-inject all children with this (as some people want) is the worst risk-management decision in the history of humanity.
Most random folks on the internet seem to be optimizing for dopamine hits, not correct answers. Anyone with an audience is optimizing for subscription uptake, which seems to reliably lead in the opposite direction from correct answers.
> Stuff about "mainstream [media] outlets" shunning all "decent journalists"
This kind of silliness does nothing but weaken the rest of your arguments, IMO.
And just FYI, I never said "all" journalists, I was only referring to most, a not altogether uncommon opinion.
Also, I don't think it would have been useful to talk about Covid response policy using figures like "X% chance of death!", since it sounds like a weather forecast and we can't even get those right one day in advance, let alone when determining policy for the entire year. And you can't conclude from absence of public discussion that these figures or expectations weren't discussed privately.
Yes, it would have been better for the policymakers to voice their reservations and motivations in public, but I'm not willing to blame the politicians for not doing that. In order to have a nuanced political discussion, all parties need to play ball. It is counterproductive for a politician to take a well-argued public position when the media only wants ten-second soundbites and actively looks ways to embarrass and undermine said politician, and when the public isn't remotely interested in a nuanced position because the tribe has already spoken.
To me, the Covid response in the West highlights a failure of democracy. That is not the same as a failure of politics, trying to pin all blame for the failure of democracy on the current politicians is just another symptom of the underlying problem. Instead, it is a failure of society at large. It seems we are no longer willing and/or capable to have an honest and open debate about matters of public policy, and that is a sad situation. I'm not even going to try and hint at the wide array of causes and consequences that led us to this point, just expressing dismay that I don't see the situation improving for the better any time soon.
This is 100% a case of the pandemic response being worse than the disease. Risks from COVID for kids is minimal. What really bothers me is that people who warned of this were berated for not following "the science", censored and labeled as someone who didn't care about COVID deaths. Imo schools should have never closed.
Unfortunately, I think there will be a lot of fallout from the poor response in years to come.
Context: https://fee.org/articles/sweden-s-top-infectious-disease-exp...
https://www.businessinsider.com/sweden-covid-no-lockdown-str...
No reason to lock down at that point unless the vaccine is ineffective.
I also think some people are too quick to disregard the degree to which young people pick up on the quality of life and lifestyle of their parents and adults. The salaryman/woman lifestyle, the extremely long working hours, and the culture of extreme deference to work hierarchies, can be soul destroying, even for your children.
The day COVID hit, children were suddenly brought back to stay at home in an environment where parents were never used to having them around.
The ministry conducts an annual survey of elementary, junior and senior high schools, and schools for special needs education across the country. It covers bullying, truancy and suicides among students.
On Wednesday, the ministry published the results of its survey conducted for the 2020 school year.
The results show a record-high 415 children killed themselves in the year through March. That's up nearly 100 from the previous school year. Seven of the students were in elementary school, 103 in junior high and 305 in senior high.
The number of elementary and junior high school students who were absent for 30 days or more was 196,127. That's up nearly 15,000 from the previous year and a record high.
The rate of children who were absent has also been on the rise. The rate for elementary children increased threefold over the past ten years, to one out of 100. The rate for junior high was one out of 24, up 50 percent.
The survey also looked into the number of children who stopped attending school due to concerns over coronavirus infection.
It shows the total of 30,287 elementary, junior high and senior high school students were absent for 30 days or more due to such concerns.
Eguchi Arichika, student affairs division chief at the ministry, says the results show that changes in school and household environments due to the pandemic have had a huge impact on children's behavior, and that the increase in the number of suicides is very regrettable.
The official adds that the ministry will work to encourage children to seek help, and to ensure learning opportunities for children who cannot attend school.
On the main matter: Societies need to cater more and better for the interest of children. All too often all other concerns come first (and children are an after thought to the interest of parents, which also aren't entirely high up in the priority list).
I'm not sure how much of this is true and/or a stereotype, but even elsewhere, i've seen parents overcrowding their kids (school)work schedules (+extracurricular activities) to absurd amounts, where the kids can't handle it anymore.
This is in comparison to my childhood, where pretty much everyone had school from 8-until somewhere between noon and 2pm (depending on the year), and after that we pretty much just "went out" and did "stupid kid stuff" (mostly hanging out)
His son thinks school in the UK is ridiculously easy. His teachers think he's amazing because he always hands in work early, it's always very neat and well done, he started off well ahead of kids his own age in maths and the sciences that are in common with Chinese schooling. The work ethic he learned there is working very well for him.
Having said that, my friend particularly wanted his son to come here for secondary education. The system over there is excessively regimented and oppressive. Education here is much broader with more scope for creativity and extra-curricular activities. They're very different systems.
As a kid I would have been playing games or watching TV at that time.
Also even if you had the best students, they are constrained by the institutions they are in and the experience of their professors. It takes generations to develop deep institutional experience and culture. They know this, and expend a lot of effort trying to get experienced Chinese academics that have studied abroad in western institutions to come back to China.
And, also, if you know the syntax of a few languages cold, but you have no creative practice at problem-solving, are lacking foundational computer science concepts and practice, then by the time you are in college or grad school, another language may have come along, while you may have to struggle to apply existing knowledge and creativity to new tools (which is the point of a CS degree).
Some students have no mental toolkit to rely on other than brute force memorizing the syntax of a new language. The difference is highly noticeable, even at a low level of college work.
My American Midwestern childhood was largely similar in the late 90’s, but I still had one parent at home full time.
So large apartment buildings in large neighbourhoods with a lot of kids of same age there (due to the way apartments were distributed), and after school, if you were bored at home, you just went out, because someone was always outside.
Parents usually worked from 6am-2pm (factory workers) or 8am-4pm (administration), so they would come home after the kids, but this was seen as normal here. The elementary schools (6/7yo - 14/15yo here) were usually a walking distance from home in the cities, so we'd be by ourselves... High school usually ended somewhere between 1pm-3pm, and you'd take a bus ride home, and depending on where your parents worked, you might still be home before them.
We did have extra-curricular activities, but usually you did one thing (eg. had football practice twice per week for 2 hours if you werent a "pro" in your age group), but it was unusal to have your day totally filled up.
I don't have kids, but a lot of my friends do, and a half of them do it in a way as we did, but about half of them sign their kids up for every activity possible, so after school it's horseriding lessons, and then tennis practice, and then music school, so they drive them around for that.... I'm not sure how a busy schedule like that would work on me in that age, but i'm pretty sure i prefered the laid-back method, and I still had no issues, from elementary school to my engineering degree.
I feel like we are entering an era where different communities are experiencing a feast or famine in regards to how they are flourishing in the ‘modern’ world. At the zoomed out earth-scale, it seems to be a darwinian process of discovering which behaviors will exist in a century (because the only vote that matters for the future is how well your children are doing, birth rates, etc.).
There's certainly a darwinian process going on with COVID-19 right now in regards to the vaccinated and willfully unvaccinated. What's not darwinian is what went on during lockdowns where well-off parents could afford to let one stay at home to keep their kids from goofing off while attending online classes.
I am unhopeful that society at large will use that as a lesson learned about providing resources to the less fortunate so their children can get the (online) education they need (even if it's just an adult keeping watch over a handful of kids). If we have another pandemic with lockdowns like this I highly suspect it will go pretty much exactly the same.
To be fully prepared for pandemics of the future families will need the resources necessary to keep an adult at home to watch over the children going through online learning. Giving people remote work opportunities could be a great (societal) inoculation, as it were against such inequities.
Suicides in Japan perhaps have an additional attraction in that insurance companies have to payout even if the cause of death is suicide.
Couple that with the asian cultural pressure of taking care of one's family, and the cultural factor that suicide on personal failure is linked to honour and glorified in Japanese history, it becomes somewhat understandable why some Japanese individuals may find suicide as a reasonable / attractive option while contemplating how to end their depressive existence.
Japan's suicide statistics don't tell the real story - https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/02/03/national/media-...
I’m not Gen Z nor are my friends, but they sometimes make me feel like they fall into this bucket of “should I check on them more often?” for the two items I laid out above.
Deep down I’m blaming social media for the increase in suicide amongst younger kids. It’s a pony show to them and they all want to outdo each other.
I went to a pumpkin patch over the weekend and two late teen girls spent an hour or so trying to get the best photos holding sunflowers. The place I was at let you pick your own sunflowers. These two girls were dressed up and proceeded to set up a camera stand for one of their cell phones that had a ring light around it. They spent that time trying to get the best photo to post to their IG pages and TikTok.
I get it that maybe they want to work on photography, but they spent way more effort and time than they should have when they were debating what to post to IG and TikTok.
::shrug::
If they spent the majority of the day outside, I feel like they have a leg up on many kids who never leave the house.
I was trying to do similar things on MySpace when I was their age; Or spending similar amounts of time chained to my desk chatting with girls on AIM; Or more frequently losing 8 hours at a clip to playing an FPS.
I had one staying in my house this weekend. They’re not as bad as we think they are. Most of my concern sits with the way the parents behave.
And yet they still persist in many parts of the world.
Given that I only really use this and Discord, there might be a correlation there?
Worshiping conflict would aptly describe social media in many areas, so the ancients were on to something :)
Elsewhere someone sarcastically asked about video games - if 1/10th the concern that was shown in the 80's and 90's over video games towards social media I think we all would be having a much different conversation.
I dunno why up until recently social media has been pretty much getting a pass. It's nice to see at least some discussion of it, especially in relation to kids, showing up in more places. I'm always amazed and somewhat appalled by how many of my peers I see just hand over phones or tablets to their kids to occupy them. At least in the past when parents parked kids in front of the TV it was one way and limited to fairly "safe" content.
Ha - after having typed that it sure makes the concerns voiced over TV in the past feel very, very quaint in comparison. Something I really hadn't considered before now.
I expect that the analysis has been done internally and just not released since it’s bad (ie, social media use is higher among suicides). Maybe a whistleblower will leak this stuff.
I think an analysis is possible by building off their typical drop off analysis. I think that because I expect all drop offs are likely analyzed to restart and avoid future drop offs. So I expect they have a way to classify people who died vs left the platform.
In the US we release a “death master file” that has names, dob, ssn a few years after death. If Japan has something similar it can be run against account holder data to see who actually died. I don’t know privacy law in Japan, but in the US cause of death is confidential. So we just know that a kid died and would need to predict cause of death from social media activity.
With this low number, they could be investigated manually to see how many children had accounts and what patterns exist in common.
You'd be surprised how many horror stories I have encountered about teenage girls commiting suicides due to peer pressure, credit card loans & inability to keep up with fashion trends.
Anecdata: My mood improved gradually after I stopped using retail antiperspirants. At some point (aka 12-18 months later) I got pissed of never being dry and went back to the stuff. It took 12h before the dark thoughts were back, took 3 showers as soon as I noticed, and it still took 3 days for the effect to stop being noticeable. Since this event I strongly think antiperspirants should be studied to confirm this is not just my mind playing tricks on me.
and yet Japan has a high suicide rate compared to many other high multi cultural developed countries.