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.
Not too surprising. Suicide is a death of despair, which are closely linked to job loss, income loss, love loss, family loss, pain, etc. Easing any of those scenarios should help reduce suicide.
Depends what do you mean by "support networks". Like social? Or just purely economy based. Cause if social then I'd say it's the exact oppopsite, one of the main reason men has 3-4x higher suicide rate than women in the west.
Better social services? Suicide, mental health and poverty all go together I think. If you want to improve suicide rates I would probably start there, though I'm no expert so I could be wrong.
There are lots of other issues, like losing supporting parents and family, lack of a support network of friends, lack of job opportunities and bad work careers, issues with pursuing healthcare and maintaining health and lack of access to healthcare, and so on.
That seems like it's likely mostly just conflated with one of the well known causes of suicide, financial instability and generally being poor. The better data would be studies that try to compare similar socioeconomic classes, age ranges, etc.
I wish it took only a second to find out what is true, but data is complicated and has lots of confounding variables, and it's too easy to not account for them and get totally untrue information out of the data.
It sounds like "it's complicated" is a better way of thinking about suicide prevention. It's pretty hard to measure a localized "it's no longer happening," when measures for suicide prevention are put in place.
Things effective one place, are less effective in others because of "sociocultural" reasons [0], but there is some evidence to suggest denying people access to the tools to commit suicide, and reducing media coverage (social contagion/clustering) seem to help.
With that said, yes, you are right, just changing one thing doesn't do much, there needs to be a bigger picture approach that addresses many factors.
I'd be interested to see a study for a link between the suicide rate and the degree of surveillance in one's life, separated from the influence of the social networks that already has been studied.
It seems to be quite obvious that the lack of personal space would cause or exacerbate the mental issues. However, the modern society tends to ignore the problems that cannot be easily tracked or assigned a metric.
Suicide isn't a single factor event. However, it's our tendency to try to isolate just one factor and then pin a suicide to that.
If we get good at identifying & gauging common forces that drive people to suicide, I suspect we'll find huge swaths of populations that live their lives 80% of the way there.
We don't know, because suicide is the only category on the chart that reflects a psychological factor. If we tracked (more correctly, if we could track) people dying of loneliness but who don't commit suicide, perhaps we'd find the number to be hugely higher. When I look at the sadness of the elderly in large cities, my sense is that number would be a lot higher. But we just don't know.
Less disturbing than the raw percentage is the context in which some of these suicides have reportedly been carried out. People who are simply lonely, who have addictions, who don't have money, who feel they simply don't have options. In sum, not the kind of people who have a truly terminal illness and will pass away in a few weeks or months, but people who could potentially live well and flourish if resources existed to support them.
IMO, a society that reaches for suicide as a solution is going to be a society that consistently fails its most vulnerable.
It's a correlation with poverty and gangs. If you take out gang on gang and suicide, assumung neither is relevant to you, it's true that the numbers become much better.
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.
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