There is nearly a 2x difference in rate between white and native americans vs blacks, asians and hispanics. I'm wondering if there is a good understanding of that difference. I don't think it is just economic.
That stood out to me as well, indeed the numbers vary a lot nationally and ethnically.
How are you supposed to study it, though? Not exactly a good situation for an exit poll.
Imaginably the government could be in a position to grant a gift, and help, to offer a moment of respite from whatever is causing the most distress -- that might help some people...
yeah, that could work if it was wide scale enough.
apparently google and facebook already have some kind of tech that estimates if people are vulnerable to suicidal ideation based on searches ("hey google, how do I kill myself painlessly?" gives the national suicide prevention hotline -- good)
Because if you're told you're supposed to "make it" since birth, and you don't, you feel like a piece of shit. Marginalized communities have been told the other story, every little thing is a win. Difference in expectations is huge, and source of all sort of bad things (like racial resentment etc...).
Solution: make this country slightly less "dog eat dog" and you'll solve a LOT of social issues almost overnight.
Does society say that? I've never come across a description of white privilege that didn't compare it to playing your life on easy mode. Sure, your life might be tough but it's less tough than it would be if you in the exact same situation and not white.
Is there evidence for this? An alternative explanation is that black and Hispanic people are more likely to be religious, and religious people have lower suicide rates in the United States. They are also more likely to have kids, which also is associated with lower suicide rates.
That's not necessarily a contradiction, since churches double as social clubs and Christian charity means supporting your neighbour who is in trouble. So if you are active in a church you belong to a circle that is a little less dog-eat-dog. Same thing with immigrant communities.
> So if you are active in a church you belong to a circle that is a little less dog-eat-dog.
That would imply that life in the US ~300 years ago, when pretty much everyone belonged to a church, was less dog-eat-dog.
If anything, I would say it was the opposite. People would often shoot someone—someone who is just as likely as themselves to be a "good Christian"—just for being an interloper on their farmland, i.e. for having the opportunity (whether they took it or not) to make off with some of their turnips.
When you're putting tremendous direct effort into those turnips, when those turnips will likely make the difference between life & death thru the winter, when others facing bleak prospects are likely to take "the opportunity to make off with those turnips", when there is no viable/relevant police enforcement to speak of, yes you take trespass very seriously.
Contrast that with the modern luxurious miracle of the $1 hamburger: with just 9 minutes of minimum-wage commodity labor, one can obtain a fresh complete meal (bread, meat, veggies, cheese) any time all year.
When you’re living the latter, the gravity of the former is hard to grasp.
Using the term "marginalized communities" as a broad descriptor for people with a certain skin color in America is misguided and counterproductive. It paints a distorted view of reality and is a political statement more than anything else.
being poor and uneducated in this country IS being marginalized. I clearly stated that if you're white the expectations are different, but whatever else you're reading in my message is your projection.
Yup, USA culture is toxic as fuck (that's not to say it's different elsewhere, just talking from experience in the US). You're expected to make money and/or have some impressive-sounding career to have "made it", or else you're a loser.
I call this the "loser" class (obviously, I don't personally see them as losers, just in terms of societal expectations). You're supposed to go make money or you're a loser. Hopefully, you're "in charge of people" too, because managers and executives are the only people that contribute to society. Do-ers just cost money. You buy a house and become a homeowner to be a "real American" and not be a loser. You better get a big car and attractive partner too. I think there's a talking heads song about this.
Worse, we think that all failures should be permanent. Once you become a member of this class, especially as you age, it becomes difficult to get out. What have you been doing all these years? Did you not want to sit in a cage for your entire adult life? No degree? Have you ever been fired? Have you had any issues with the law? Well, you're done. No longer a member of the "successful American" class, you're now a loser. A despised and ridiculed lesser class within society.
We'll let a few losers out, and rise to the level of good American, but generally, they stay there. Don't forget that you deserve this, and it's your fault because you're a bad person. I'm not surprised by the suicide rate at all.
I mean the data by race suggests it’s not economic, right? Black, Hispanic, and Asian people have half the suicide rate of non-Hispanic white people.
Another anomaly: Hispanic people have the second highest life expectancies in the United States (after Asians), significantly higher than non-Hispanic whites, despite on average having lower incomes and health insurance coeverage.
I'd like to see the correlations after things such as how many close family members and friends one has are taken in to account.
I suspect that the larger and more cohesive one's support network is, the less likely you are to commit suicide, and that the more socially isolated one is, the poorer one is, and the sicker one is, the more likely one is to feel hopeless and see suicide as the only way out.
Other important factors are things like how many recent traumatic events (such as relationship breakups, serious illness, bereavement, rape, witnessing or being a victim of violence, etc) one has suffered, recent alcohol and drug use/abuse, and then very hard to quantify things like how good one is at coping with such events.
You can't really boil all this down to any one factor, and there's no one solution to any of these issues. But, yes, reducing misery (whether economic or social) should help.
Most of the evidence suggests (unintuitively) that insurance coverage doesn't have much of an impact on health outcomes, but does have a large impact on economic outcomes. I say that as a supporter of M4A
If you're going to disaggregate, by sex is the major axis. If the gap reversed, it would likely become one of the greatest issues to solve, whatever it took.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States#/...
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