I do wonder about the suicide rate, with this in mind. (ie accepting stuck in some situation and ending it vs trying to get out and getting murdered in the process)
> It's simple maths. In the worst year for suicides, Foxconn had 14 deaths out of 930,000 workers. Divide one by the other and you get a remarkably low suicide rate by any standard.
You need to take it one step further; you should compare it to the suicide rate of healthy, employed young adults. If (for example) the suicide rate is higher than employed adults, but comparable to unemployed, it would show a serious problem at the factory.
In many industrialized countries suicide rates are not spread equally across all demographic groups.
This is interesting, to treat a high suicide rate as a symptom of some other problem, rather than the main problem in and of itself. I wish these fancy American social scientists were capable of taking a similar look at USA, but alas it's all beams and motes.
It's worth noting that there are qualitative differences to be considered, and people committing suicide at that rate (or any rate at all) should be investigated to address the conditions of these workers. To simply look at a comparison of the rates misses out that different factors and motivations drive these suicides.
>>How should I view a falling rate of suicide but rising rate of suicide attempts?
Badly. People dying to suicide is not good, but like any cause of death, it's going to happen. I think the bigger picture of overall degradation in mental health is a worse indicator than the deaths of people's quality of life. Personally I think you address the overall underlying issues, which would lead to lower death rates.
If we heard that deaths from car accidents was down but the number of accidents was way up, we'd want to do something to address it because clearly there's a problem.
We can't draw too many conclusions from the article, but a rise in the rate of suicide would not be a surprise. We know that economic uncertainty, isolation, or lack of access to support all increase deaths by suicide.
I pulled some WHO data for a collection of North American and European countries over the last thirty years[1], and while it's factually accurate that US suicide rates are at a 30-year high the rate remains middle-of-the-pack for developed Western nations. The "surge" is a small absolute increase from the 30-year baseline.
That does not make it any less tragic or less deserving of attention, but we should pick appropriately-scaled policy solutions instead of those we might use for a crisis. (The NPR piece today about suicide rates in Greenland strikes me as an extreme crisis.[2])
It's also worth noting, for all the people pointing out economic causes for increased suicide, that economically-battered Greece has by far the lowest suicide rate in this group.
Not globally.
A search suggests suicide rates are down 15% in 10 years. That is, suicides have gone down remarkably.
If we're talking about the UK/US (which I haven't sourced but I can believe), it's more likely that conservative policies are driving people to feel they have no alternative.
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