3 ms·

Yeah, but I'll bet it's high-quality and comparable enough among some countries to be useful. Tracking these three causes together would probably help as well;

by mr_luc 8y ago

Yeah, but I'll bet it's high-quality and comparable enough among some countries to be useful. Tracking these three causes together would probably help as well; if one culture is biased towards over-counting overdoses, for instance, and under-counting suicides (which makes me think of the Ray Bradbury line, that someone had "jumped off a pill bottle"), tracking stats for a few proximate causes probably helps get a better overall picture.

Bartweiss 8y ago
Yep, suicide comparisons between developed countries are very possible - you just can't use headline reported numbers. I had occasion to look into this one recently, actually. In the UK, for example, undetermined-intent drug and injury deaths among adults are included in suicide statistics by default. (That's based largely on the logic that intent is hard to show and false positives are quite painful, while determination of an accident is comparatively easy and harmless.) The US doesn't include those deaths as suicides, but with standardized ICD codes we can easily recover the data. Adding them in raises the US suicide rate about 11%. Demography is also available, and pretty significant. The US suicide spike is overwhelmingly in adults, so while the US suicide rate is 66% higher than the UK (without definition correction), the age-adjusted death rate is 40% higher. And you're right about the mixed causes, too. There are probably a nontrivial number of suicides which are explicitly ruled 'accidental', but stats like "overdoses plus suicides" do a lot of work correcting for that. Even for laypeople it's enough to start with, and then actual researchers of course go into specific data on traffic deaths, drownings, and so on.
- DanBC 8y ago
  But even in the UK you have variation across years. For one example - the burden of proof used by coroners changed in 2018. This means it's going to be a bit tricky to compare deaths before and after this date, and there's going to be variation as this information is applied by coroners as they get used to the new level. https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Admin/2018/1955.html https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Admin/2018/1955.html And the coroners numbers do affect the ONS data. The ONS describe the difficulties of comparing data across nations here: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/suicidesintheunitedkingdom/2014registrations#comparison-with-other-countries https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...

by mr_luc 8y ago

Bartweiss 8y ago

Yep, suicide comparisons between developed countries are very possible - you just can't use headline reported numbers. I had occasion to look into this one recently, actually. In the UK, for example, undetermined-intent drug and injury deaths among adults are included in suicide statistics by default. (That's based largely on the logic that intent is hard to show and false positives are quite painful, while determination of an accident is comparatively easy and harmless.) The US doesn't include those deaths as suicides, but with standardized ICD codes we can easily recover the data. Adding them in raises the US suicide rate about 11%. Demography is also available, and pretty significant. The US suicide spike is overwhelmingly in adults, so while the US suicide rate is 66% higher than the UK (without definition correction), the age-adjusted death rate is 40% higher. And you're right about the mixed causes, too. There are probably a nontrivial number of suicides which are explicitly ruled 'accidental', but stats like "overdoses plus suicides" do a lot of work correcting for that. Even for laypeople it's enough to start with, and then actual researchers of course go into specific data on traffic deaths, drownings, and so on.

DanBC 8y ago
But even in the UK you have variation across years. For one example - the burden of proof used by coroners changed in 2018. This means it's going to be a bit tricky to compare deaths before and after this date, and there's going to be variation as this information is applied by coroners as they get used to the new level. https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Admin/2018/1955.html https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Admin/2018/1955.html And the coroners numbers do affect the ONS data. The ONS describe the difficulties of comparing data across nations here: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/suicidesintheunitedkingdom/2014registrations#comparison-with-other-countries https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...