Founder Suicides
feld.com
feld.com
Even if it is just raising awareness and just telling people about the suicide hot line.
It is a rather insidious double edged sword.
and a recent example: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2014/08...
Here's how the CDC recommends handling this sort of thing: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00031539.htm
"The suicides that follow these stories are excess deaths. After the initial spurt, the suicide rates do not drop below traditional levels but only return to those levels."
https://fc.deltasd.bc.ca/~dmatthews/FOV2-00074762/S02DB0598....
The studies Cialdini writes about in that chapter are older, because his book is older. If anyone can report on more recent work, please do. This is worrisome stuff.
I read that PDF. Twice. It makes some ... great leaps of conclusion and assumption, without much in the way of investigation or data. It concludes for example that young people intentionally fatally drove their cars into trees because they read articles about suicide, but it presents no actual evidence for that case other than a statistical correlation.
As is mentioned frequently on HN, correlation in statistics is tricky: http://tylervigen.com/
I don't think we have enough information at hand to suppress discussion of depression or suicide.
Let's hear from someone who knows about the latest work on this, or some evidence that those findings are bogus.
1. I mean the book, not the pdf. Obviously I would link to the book if I could; it happens not to be online. The pdf is, and it at least covers the main points (as I recall them—I read the book years ago).
We won't get to, because every time the subject comes up now on HN, someone says, "don't talk about this, it's dangerous."
> In comparison with older persons, adolescents and young adults who commit suicide are less likely to be clinically depressed or to have certain other mental disorders (3) that are important risk factors for suicide among persons in all age groups (4). This has led to research directed at the identification of other preventable risk factors for suicide among young persons.
In other words, this may not apply to people who suffer from clinical depression, because they weren't the focus of this workshop.
> These findings have induced efforts on the part of many suicide- prevention specialists, public health practitioners, and researchers to curtail the reporting of suicide -- especially youth suicide -- in newspapers and on television. Such efforts were often counterproductive, and news articles about suicides were written without the valuable input of well- informed suicide-prevention specialists and others in the community.
Emphasis on the counterproductive part: they aren't recommending that suicides not be discussed at all, they are recommending changing how they are discussed:
> ...and characteristics of news coverage that appear to foster suicide contagion were described.
Again, they are describing specific types of news coverage.
> Some characteristics of news coverage of suicide may contribute to contagion, and other characteristics may help prevent suicide. ... Clinicians and researchers acknowledge that it is not news coverage of suicide per se, but certain types of news coverage, that promote contagion. Persons concerned with preventing suicide contagion should be aware that certain characteristics of news coverage, rather than news coverage itself, should be avoided.
They are reiterating that point again. It's probably important.
The article then goes on to outline, in brief, the specific aspects of reporting which the workshop participants thought might promote contagion. Importantly, none of Feld's article featured any of those aspects.
The CDC link concludes with this:
> ...the workshop participants strongly agreed that reporting of suicide can have several direct benefits. Specifically, community efforts to address this problem can be strengthened by news coverage that describes the help and support available in a community, explains how to identify persons at high risk for suicide, or presents information about risk factors for suicide.
I don't think we can indefinitely continue to hide this particular problem. There are still too many people who believe depression doesn't exist; there are still too many people who are reluctant to talk about it because of the social stigma that they think it might have.
You are not alone.
Holy shit, that's unbelievable. I basically don't drive because I have long believed that driving is an unnecessarily risky thing to do -- indeed, because it kills so many people. To find out now that more people are lost to suicide than car accidents is pretty bizarre.
I agree with rdtsc up above by the way that we should just not bring this up on social media too much. It's one place we should censor ourselves. Merely even talking about it exposes suicide as an option. Avoiding talking about it really is the way to go.
In addition to recognizing the types of news coverage that can promote suicide contagion, the workshop participants strongly agreed that reporting of suicide can have several direct benefits. Specifically, community efforts to address this problem can be strengthened by news coverage that describes the help and support available in a community, explains how to identify persons at high risk for suicide, or presents information about risk factors for suicide. An ongoing dialogue between news media professionals and health and other public officials is the key to facilitating the reporting of this information.
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00031539.htm
We absolutely need to talk about this problem. No one is helped by silence.
Imagine it was magical and you just kinda popped into the spot you were thinking about. But what if there's something occupying that spot now? Would you just teleport into it? Or would it swap you and whatever was in that spot? What if there's still more of that object there? Would you suffocate in a newly built wall or get squished by moving machinery? You could always teleport only to places you can see, but I imagine that would be quite disorienting. Zap, your entire field of vision changed without you registering any movement. You'll proably get dissy and accidentally teleport somewhere dangerous.
Or let's go with the Star Trek like beaming. Are there transcription errors that slowly build up? What if the exit node uses a different kind of encoding than the entry node?
Teleportation seems awfully dangerous.
If we want to make this life an enjoyable experience for as many people as possible, we should be looking at trends in suicide and trying to figure out what's wrong. I hope you all stay because the best part is ahead of us, but it's OK to me if you decide to leave, too.
That said, I can imagine how bad it must be to be a founder in Las Vegas. I think the place is phony, hot, unsustainable, and lacking in genuine purpose and liveliness.
In the same way, depression-based suicide takes considerable toll on not only friends and family, but the people who witness / discover you. I don't have the same opinion on assisted suicide for chronic illness, as I believe it is a dignified choice, but I personally can't be OK with someone taking their life in depression as though that is their ultimate will. Depression affects the will, and as a mental health issue it is something these people need to be aided with in recovering to full health.
I love to see this roll out on a wider scale. Living in Germany, sometimes, I have a hard time getting social interactions. That is not to say that the Germans are socially hard to connect with. I have grown up in Australia and adjustment to the German social environment is quite difficult.
One thing was to put below fold the flagged stories, but this is plain censorship.
We have to learn about the bad sides of the startup industry to grow. Else this will keep repeating.
(Full disclosure: I run this wiki.)