I agree with some of your criticism, but also criticize how you have thrown out some off-the-cuff beliefs that I would suggest are not true or irrelevant (not a

I agree with some of your criticism, but also criticize how you have thrown out some off-the-cuff beliefs that I would suggest are not true or irrelevant (not all of them though) and wish I could help participate in further research and collaborative analysis. For instance, you have pointed out several things that are "bad", but haven't necessarily changed or are better overall than they have ever been (hate for meaningless jobs, parental leave, working too much) but you are sometimes comparing current US against other countries, not looking at the fact that these are still on generally positive trends historically. Some things that might be less-or-irrelevant include: -Inequality: Yes this is true, but the poorest people are better off and there are fewer of them than there have been historically. Many people considered poor these days have cell phones, can afford nutritious meals (even if they don't eat them) and have access to welfare and disability that wasn't available 100 years ago. -Leisure time: On average, people are spending 20+ less hours a week working than they did 100 years ago, and spend far less time doing household chores. While there is certainly cause for concern and much more progress to be made, overall things are on a positive trend, and most of your arguments only compare against other countries at the current time -- I don't get a sense that this is a major cause of suicide increases. I also would like to learn more about how the statistics were derived. Are they using the same definition of suicide? Are there other factors? For instance, if someone overdoses on opiates and dies from it, is that considered suicide according to these statistics? I'm not flat-out disagreeing with you, but rather I would like to better understand which factors are most influential and also what exactly it is they are reporting -- the source material didn't seem to specify whether they were reporting % increases as an absolute number or number of suicides per 100k people, etc. Steven Pinker's newest book, Enlightenment Now, touches on this topic, and explores statistics and some considerations for what may or may not be influential factors for recent trends in suicide, as well as pretty much every bullet point you provided.