Tag Archives: suicide

(slightly less) depressing stats on the U.S.: suicides

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Here are some suicide stats from Our World in Data. It would be nice if they would add some more groupings like OECD, but I have chosen a somewhat arbitrary sample of peer countries. It surprised me that even though we are hearing about “deaths of despair”, the U.S. is not doing terribly on this metric compared to peers. We are doing a bit worse than our close cultural cousins Canada and Australia. The UK does surprisingly well on this metric, even a bit better than Germany and Denmark. Latin America (I picked Mexico because they’re our neighbor and Brazil because they’re big) doesn’t seem to have a big issue with suicide. The two Asian countries I picked do seem to have an issue – Japan has a higher suicide rate than all the European countries I picked. Then there is a big jump to the two worst countries (that I picked arbitrarily), South Korea and Russia. Russia is the worst, but has brought its rate down a lot if you buy into this data analysis.

mass shootings and suicide

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Mass shooters are often motivated by essentially suicidal fantasies. They just sometimes decide to take an elementary school class with them. It’s hard to be sympathetic, but then again it highlights how the lack of access to quality health care and mental health care in particular is part of what is rotting our society from the inside out. t seems to me we are lumping unrelated phenomena from a few categories:

  • disputes, fights, drug and gang-related activity – like the street shootings in Philadelphia’s South Street recently, but depressingly this happens every day in many cities
  • suicidal depression coupled with violence – like most school shootings
  • foreign religious/ideological/geopolitical extremism, such as 9/11
  • domestic anti-government, sometimes racist extremism, such as the Oklahoma City bombing

The latter two you could maybe lump together, although ironically these groups would consider each other enemies. The first two are completely different though. There are several different problems here with several different solutions.

Don’t get me wrong, there are still too many guns in too many hands and too many people who think more violence is the answer to our violence problem.

disturbing numbers on U.S. suicides

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The U.S. suicide rate is climbing alarmingly at a time when rates are falling in other modern democracies. What is going wrong with our society? Other than these three paragraphs, this long article is about some examples of practical steps psychologists can take to prevent suicide.

Over the last two decades, suicide has slowly and then very suddenly announced itself as a full-blown national emergency. Its victims accompany factory closings and the cutting of government assistance. They haunt post-9/11 military bases and hollow the promise of Silicon Valley high schools. Just about everywhere, psychiatric units and crisis hotlines are maxed out. According to the most recent figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there are now more than twice as many suicides in the U.S. (45,000) as homicides; they are the 10th leading cause of death. You have to go all the way back to the dawn of the Great Depression to find a similar increase in the suicide rate. Meanwhile, in many other industrialized Western countries, suicides have been flat or steadily decreasing.

What makes these numbers so scary is that they can’t be explained away by any sort of demographic logic. Black women, white men, teenagers, 60-somethings, Hispanics, Native Americans, the rich, the poor—they are all struggling. Suicide rates have spiked in every state but one (Nevada) since 1999. Kate Spade’s and Anthony Bourdain’s deaths were shocking to everybody but the epidemiologists who track the data.

And these are just the reported cases. None of the numbers above account for the thousands of drug overdose deaths that are just suicides by another name. If you widen the lens a bit to include those contemplating suicide, the problem starts to take on the contours of an epidemic. In 2014, the federal government estimated that 9.4 million American adults had seriously considered the idea.