Suicide is on the rise for young Americans, with no clear answers
bbc.com
bbc.com
The deadly combination of not being able to afford food/rent and being told that you're just a few tiktoks/onlyfans/hustles away from an independently wealthy lifestyle
And social media pushes quick fixes rather than the typical long haul of university and steady job towards reaching a comfortable life or at least something that feels like progress.
Edited to add, it's only worse that a lot of these quick fixes are fraudulent; the van life or trad wife influencers are often recipients of generational wealth to begin with.
So far some of the proposals include: the world is teetering on the edge, men are not listened to and social media usage.
I don't see why any of these three things impact Americans disproportionately compared to say to places like Saudi Arabia, Germany and China where suicide in the young is much less than the US.
Given that suicide tends to impact 2x to 3x times more the unemployed than the employed [1], what is truly interesting here in my opinion is that America has an even higher young suicide rate than places with very high youth unemployment such as South Europe or Middle East. My guess it is something to do with culture, family ties and the stigma of not being in work or "productive".
[1] https://jech.bmj.com/content/57/8/594 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9298506/
The Old Country has a similar vibe, and I think (in any country) the young are far more likely to be (economically if not culturally) poor than rich.
In fact people will declare to you "I live with one of my kids who finished university three years ago and is currently unemployed" with no hint of disappointment, but the situation in some parts of the west and especially the US, people will talk about unemployed university graduates as total losers and embarrassment.
compare https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/images/th...
EDIT: also, at the high end of the US real estate market, I note that the phrase "family compound" was often correlated with "price upon request".
Yes, a motivated person will kill himself with or without access to guns, but how could having nearly one in every two households[1] not be at least a factor?
1: https://news.gallup.com/poll/264932/percentage-americans-own...
My wife shared too much, was held for three days and experienced SA while there. It made things much worse.
There's very few resources for people who have ideation, would benefit from talking about it, and don't want to be sectioned.
https://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/legal-rights/sec...
In our times the answer is 'things are bad and the system is working as intended'.
I read some harrowing pieces about the AIDS epidemic and the hopelessness that came from the dismissal of the rest of the world and it felt similar (worse obviously).
Correction: Working people were organized so the capitalist class had to do what the workers told them to do.
Literally 2 days ago: "Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39983233
I'm sure it's not the only thing, but it is a major change for 20-somethings in the last 10 years or so that they have much easier access to THC products that are extraordinarily potent.
People are tired of capitalism reducing them to numbers that the powers that be -- now corporate interests -- give no shits about.
Drugs to treat ADHD and other behavioral/emotional problems have become much more common
We need to help get some people off their phones and back helping their communities and building local in person relationships that have meaning and impact.
Or is this another one of those "ask HN" statements?
Fear gets clicks and views.
FTFY.
The USA should not involve itself in the affairs of others. Period. It’s just a modern form of colonialism where the UsA views itself as superior and a possessor of all knowledge and goodness and therefore the rest of the globe needs its help. This is not the case.
Yes. There's no source, no nuance, no justification, no explanation, no analysis, no hope, no details, it's as pure a jolt of dense negative emotion in one sentence as you can manage. You're choosing emotionally charged words like 'slaughter'. You're speculating that something halfway around the world will involve the reader's home country, because that makes it feel closer and more scary. It's absolutely fearmongering.
There were many people on HN, like you, the Russian government, and Snowden literally saying people were "fear mongering" because they were warning about the fact of the Russian invasion.
https://twitter.com/DAlperovitch/status/1770800449777549672
Do you have any evidence or track record to support your position? Any Russian invasion predictions you called successfully? If not, I'd leave dismissals of current US Gov. understanding of the situation to the full time geo-pol pro's who do successfully predict things.
> "told Ukrainians in 2021 that they were going to be invaded by Russia, which would mean 100,000+ of them killed and maimed, would you also say they were "fear mongering"
Maybe, this depends if they were commenting with good evidence because they were trying to get Ukranians to fight or escape, or if they were commenting because they wanted to make Ukranians afraid. The Ukrainian government saying "imminent invasion, 100,000+ of us will die, here's what we need to be doing" might not be fearmongering, Russia saying "we're imminently invading, 100,000+ of you will die" might be fearmongering. Americans telling each other "Russia will invade Ukraine, 100,000+ people will die, the world is ending, mass slaughter!, NATO will fall, Europe is history! Russia will move onto Georgia and then Poland!" absolutely would be fearmongering.
> "Do you have any evidence or track record to support your position?"
My position is that your comment is fearmongering. My evidence is your comment.
> "If not, I'd leave dismissals of current US Gov. understanding of the situation to the full time geo-pol pro's who do successfully predict things."
I'm not dismissing US Gov understanding of the situation, I'm criticising your fearmongering echoing of things. Do you have any track record of helping stop China invading Taiwan? If not, stop spreading fear for upvotes and leave the warfare preparations to the pros.
Ah, then your position falls apart. The more people would've been aware of Russia's plans for Ukraine, the earlier and better a formidable defense could've been. Same in as in Taiwan. That requires people understanding what the future possibly holds and how to deter the worst case.
Do you have any evidence or track record to support your position?
On the other hand, do you really think any nuclear power, be it Russia, USA, China, would allow being defeated in an existential war and just dissolve without bringing down the whole world?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Criticism_and...
Just like magic... if enough people stop believing in nuclear winter, then it becomes a nuclear free for all.
Predicting the severity of events in advance is difficult. I wouldn't listen to what historians predict today. Every catastrophe is different, but despite this people like to pretend (after the fact) all the signs were there and were obvious.
For all we know Ukraine will stay confined and China will just keep being belligerent but take no action.
China vs Taiwan standoff. China recently built a Taipei city center mock up in the desert. Taiwan controls 90%+ of global microchip production.
Recent Armenia vs Azerbaijan (supported by Turkey) war. More tension on border.
Israel levelled Gaza and killed 30,000 Palestinian civilians, and is striking Lebanon and Syria. Iran posturing back.
Posturing in Africa by Russia, France, and China.
North Korea being noisy as usual.
This is literally just the tip of the iceberg.
I completely missed the Armenia/Azerbaijan conflict, but from what I can tell, tensions there don't seem likely to pull many other countries into it. Curious if you have thoughts on that.
> Posturing in Africa by Russia, France, and China.
Can you explain why this would lead to a potential world war? Most of what I can find about this is foreign countries vying for economic influence, which seems unlikely to burst into conflict, especially one that would become a world war.
Africa is too much to summarize - basically look into what Wagner and US PMCs were doing there. It's just more proxy conflict.
Missiles and radar powered by Intel/Altera chips will do the job just fine until more domestic fab capacity can be spun up. Most defense products are running on processes from two decades or more ago and are already legally forced to consider adversarial supply chain issues.
2. "the things you're using these advanced chips for will no longer be relevant", "Missiles and radar powered by Intel/Altera chips will do the job just fine until more domestic fab capacity can be spun up." Hard-disagree. US advantage is in high resolution AESA sensors, thermals, and fast advanced processing and comms. We aren't talking Tomahawks and PESA radars when it comes to competitive advantage.
Finally, there is a reason why domestic fab capacity is ramping up slowly in the US and Russia doesn't have such capability to speak of - it's hard and the major powers are behind.
Which adversary would these chips yield an advantage against in a nuclear war?
Domestic fab capacity is ramping up slowly because these facilities are multi-billion-dollar, multi-decade endeavors. Intel's existing domestic fabs can make everything a war-fighting nation could need, capacity and capability-wise.
Keep in mind the article's target age group just barely excluded me and includes most my friends. Its not like we're scolding kindergarten kids here.
Yes that is precisely the age group that is trying to reconcile their world view, life goals, and relationship with the world.
The world probably has never been as peaceful as in the last 50 years or so.
Same goes for access to drinkable water, food, decent shelter, gender equality, freedoms, technology, etc.
But I suppose your comment is a good illustration of the problem at hands (that so many people deeply believe that things are fucked)
You are probably living in a different world than the rest of us.
though, the fact that there are no real issues could indeed be an issue.
To understand the differences between feudalism and capitalism, you must also understand the conflict between the feudalist aristocracy (god-given) and the capitalist bourgeoise (industrious accumulators of capital). This conict was really the source of the shift to capitalism. The aristocracy could not compete with the capitalists as the capitalists promoted a story of mobility by accumulating capital. Of course, however, only a few can achieve that, and they basically still argue that their abilities are god-given. But the claim about abilities and hard work paying off vs. simple i herited permanent roles results in a much more damaging psychology.
Unfortunately, people do tend to be happier if they're miserable among other miserable people, than if they were living comfortably among people with cooler things than them.
It is very well understood across all relevant metrics that younger people are less economically secure than their parents. Coupled with extreme and growing wealth inequality, this is bound to be a political problem whether you like it or not. And, these suicide numbers suggest it may be a serious psychological problem as well. Your platitudes don't change that.
It’s not that they were fully ignorant of the news in the past, but people used to get most of their “takes” and opinions from like, a weekly editorial column or Sunday paper or something that would sort of bubble up through various cultural filtering mechanisms. By the time it got to your typical 17 year old it has already gone through a “processing mechanism” where it’s been analyzed, contextualized, better understood. They’re not getting the messy information in raw form.
Now they get the raw information as it happens, and often bubbling up from agenda driven activists instead of disinterested analysts. Consequently, everything has a heavy emotional charge and is specifically geared to short circuit the rational mechanisms for understanding things and hit you in the lizard brain. The lizard brain is good for quick thinking and rapid reactions, but it’s not very good at emotional regulation, priority setting, or any of the other stuff that’s conducive to mental health.
https://cos.northeastern.edu/news/its-time-to-correct-neuros...
There are so many things that statistics don’t cover it’s unreal.
One thing that especially comes to mind is that many of the illusions of society have been shattered by the younger generations. Things like believing you should be loyal to your employer because they’ll return the favor.
Nobody's believed that since, I'd say, the 1970s-1980s. Even Japan, famous for its culture of lifetime employment, phased that out in the 1990s. It's ridiculous to suggest that that's a new phenomenon.
Peaceful? As in Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, Iran? Brazil is at great risk also.
I don't think so.
So all the defense ministers in europe for example, who urge us to get ready for real war, are paranoid then?
25 years ago it was mostly peaceful, with a steady downward trend since then. And many people, including government officials, see now a war between china and US as inevitable. That is different from my youth, which was mainly optimistic, with the big players negotiating and demilitarizing.
It would be good to see the evidence for a war from the last two years would a) cause suicide and b) do it instantly.
That is about deterrence, no?
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/have-peace-europe-must-...
50k deaths put this at roughly a Vietnam war every year.
It's nonsense.
There's been a land war in Europe for the first time since WW2 going on, if you hadn't noticed. About a half million casualties.
We solved the ozone layer. The right just refuses to engage with climate change as we rush past the worst case projections.
Wealth inequality is at historic extremes.
Pretty much any honest review is going to be profoundly demoralizing.
Food that’s hyperpalatable, full of sugar, and devoid of nutrition. Case-in-point, the obesity crisis.
Sure technology is great but the internet has fucked our brains. The tech industry repeatedly creates hype bubbles like crypto to make a buck. And don’t even get me started about AI.
Gender equality is far from resolved for both men and women. Women still have to deal with harassment and men are now expected to fulfill contradictory roles of being both a progressive feminist and a traditional masculine man.
Sure things are great when you oversimplify and ignore the bad parts.
Like, I'm sure someone in Flint a few years ago wouldn't begrudge more people having access to drinkable water but they're obviously going to be massively unhappy about having to consider the possibility of no longer having access to it themselves.
But, very few people people commit suicide purely in response to their despair concerning the state of the world. There are almost always deeper mental health issues involved. And as strange as it sounds, suicide goes in and out of fashion as well. In general, it's very difficult to drill down on causality of suicide rates.
True, but we are not talking about the last 50 years, we are talking about the future, for example, the next 5 years. People don't commit suicide if they think their future will be OK.
> Same goes for access to drinkable water, food, decent shelter, gender equality, freedoms, technology, etc.
- Item 2 and 3 ignore recent rises in food prices and housing prices.
- For the U.S., item 4 and 5 have been reduced in many places by various recent laws and judicial decisions (unless you are super rich), and this will probably continue for the near future.
- The last item - 6 - technology. I think for a non-tech-person standpoint, it really appears like technology primarily has ...
A) ... stagnated. Phones--the tech most people use daily--haven't done anything new and exciting for some time. The Internet hasn't given the non-tech public-at-large the next big thing after social media, either.
B) ... primarily become interested in putting monthy fees, ads and tracking on everything one does, and
C) ... a mission replace most jobs with A.I.
> "Russia & China constantly attacking countries' computer & physical infrastructure, etc."
Is this in any way comparable to physical warfare?
Speculation, but I strongly suspect that only a blind Pinker follower would so confidently say that.
Do you happen to live on earth, Professor. Pangloss's disciple[1]?
oh jeez, say that to the people of Palestine or the Congo. people who make these blanket generalizations are either tone deaf or come from a place of privilege.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_modern_conflicts_in_th...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Arab%E2%80%93Is...
Pointing to one thing going wrong so you can call people 'privileged' doesn't change it. Nuclear Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), NATO, the EU, the USA, the generally calm dissolution of the British/French/Spanish empires, the end of new lands to find, has stabilised a lot.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_in_Europe
But their phone says this is different, so they believe it. Mission Accomplished.
Meanwhile Putin is itching for a rationalization to drop a nuke in Ukraine.
Those last 50 years were a side effect from one of two global powers catastrophically collapsing. The tensions that drive modern history didn't dissolve when that happened, they were just tabled as numerous contending powers with their own visions of the world reorganized and regrouped. Maybe we can all diplomatically navigate our way past the worst outcomes along the way, but the next 50 years simply aren't going to look like the last 50.
Doom and despair sells like hotcakes. Stop consuming so much media, you’re too valuable, and way more than some addiction pushing tech corporation’s product.
Suicide rates are up by around ~2.6%. In 2021, 48,183 people were recorded to die from suicide. While in 2022 it was 49,449.
Meanwhile, ~650,000 people die each year in the U.S from heart disease. This is all considering that the U.S has 330 million people.
The rate of people that die from suicide each year is barely a single basis point in relation to the total population.
And now you have HN, where everyone mainlines these propaganda pieces everyday, for years on end. The amount of time I've wasted.
You realize that for every person that commits suicide, there are many many more who attempt or almost attempt?
It's a good proxy indicator, and one of many that are in trouble.
I'm of the opinion empathy and consideration is finite, so when you spread it to larger and larger collections of people it becomes too diffuse, and the ones most closest to us (friends, loved ones, people in the community, etc.) do not receive it sufficiently.
Likewise, none of us are in any position to do anything at all about this issue, but armchair theorize and feel moved by it for a few minutes -- as well as have our perception of the world tilted negatively (for what purpose?).
I should really go for a walk, instead of absorbing this junk food.
Mate, you don't even know what "fucked" (quoting the parent post) looks like.
In fact, saying that "we had it way worse" is probably a sentiment that leads to people stuffing their feelings because "what do I have to complain about" until it gets to the point that they off themselves.
Young people today don't have that belief. And they're probably correct. Our society is visibly committed to not solving any of the problems facing it, and the levers of decision-making are very clearly out of the hands of anyone who cares about solving them.
Edit: removed an edit.
A nation of mostly good karma. Can you believe it? Really rustles the “I hate my country because we are colonizers” crowd like Howard Zinn - especially when you look to the religious beliefs of the people in those conquered countries (I.e Cambodia, Myanmar, Vietnam)
It's very dumb.
America looks like paradise in comparison.
‘We will coup whoever we want!’ - Elon Musk.