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Yeah, but lowering the 50% one will increase usage of the other methods significantly. The US isn't magically going to have insanely low suicide rates if you ma

• jdietrich 7y ago
  >Yeah, but lowering the 50% one will increase usage of the other methods significantly. The evidence says otherwise. Most suicidal ideation is brief and impulsive, so making it harder to access effective means of suicide doesn't just lead to a substitution. Multiple studies have found a lasting reduction in the overall suicide rate after a highly lethal means of suicide became less easily available. The majority of people who survive a suicide attempt say that they decided to attempt suicide less than an hour beforehand; simply increasing the delay between impulse and action can be life-saving. 90% of people who attempt suicide do not go on to make a further attempt, so merely inducing people to choose a less lethal method is a net win. https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/ https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/
  • umvi 7y ago
    Unless you can show a country's (i.e. Australia's) suicide rate plummeting shortly after banning guns, I'm going to have a hard time believing it has a big an impact as you claim. There are lots of first world countries in EU and Asia where guns are banned that have suicide rates comparible to or higher than the US's (and I have a hard time believing guns are the only thing standing between the US being comparible to its peers and having insanely low suicide rates) Even still, there are other ways of increasing suicide friction than outright bans. Firearm waiting periods (to prevent same-day purchase suicides) would increase friction, suicide pamphlets with every sale would increase friction, etc
    • Analemma_ 7y ago
      - After the UK phased out coal gas for central heating, which provided a quick and easy death, overall suicides dropped markedly: [0]. - When Sri Lanka replaced a common pesticide which made it easy for farmers to commit suicide with another one that was not as toxic to humans, suicide rates fell by half: [1] - Many different bridges which were popular suicide sites installed bridges and found that overall suicides decreased and did not relocate to nearby bridges without nets. Here is one example from Montreal, there are many others: [2] It is very well-established in the literature that eliminating easy means to suicide does reduce total suicides and causes only a minor a displacement effect to other methods. Your obstinance on this fact is only making you look like a flat-earther. [0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC478945/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC478945/ [1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3154644/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3154644/ [2]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3682603/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3682603/
      • yellowapple 7y ago
        Per your links: - The coal gas phaseout's associated decrease in suicide rates principally affected men; women more readily jumped to other alternatives (as indicated on the graphs). It also principally affected England and Wales (Scotland showed far more modest decreases in suicide among men, and effectively no change among women), which prompted the authors of that paper to exclude Scotland from their conclusions due to the anomalous data; it's possible that Scotland didn't phase out coal gas as quickly, but the drop in suicide-by-CO-suffocation seems to support the idea that Scotland and England/Wales were under the same conditions. - Per the chart in the Sri Lanka article that breaks down poisoning v. "other specified methods" v. "other means", poisoning actually increased (even ignoring the spike in 1983), and most of the reductions were in the "other means" category (which was completely eliminated by 2005). The "Data for risk factors in suicide" section also details various other factors that are more probable than banning a specific kind of poison (namely: the civil war that was raging in Sri Lanka during almost all of time period when suicide rates fell, consistent with the article's remark that suicide rates do typically fall significantly during times of war). - The Montreal article only concludes that suicide specifically by jumping did not displace to other jumping sites. It makes no conclusion around other means of suicide (and while suicide rates did fall in general, the article states that this trend began 5 years before the installation of the nets on the studied bridge). EDIT: in general, I don't feel like any of those sources do an adequate job of isolating these potential causes from other factors; they do demonstrate at least some correlation, but - as the saying famously goes - correlation != causation, and there are numerous other factors that tend to drive suicide rates, especially socioeconomic and cultural.
• tialaramex 7y ago
  That isn't how suicide works. I know the US is just very bad at this, but you can literally look at other countries and learn from their experiences. I know, some of them don't speak the same language, but it turns out Americans are just human like everybody else. Interventions _work_ without making suicide impossible, because the suicide victims aren't rational people looking to kill themselves, they are crazy and have fixated on a plan that would kill them. When the plan doesn't work they are reset by that and most won't kill themselves. The most internationally famous example is Town Gas. Britain used to make a dangerous but useful flammable gas called "Town Gas" by processing coal. The gas burned reasonably cleanly and coal was readily available, but the gas was toxic and so you may have heard the phrase "Stick your head in the oven" - the idea isn't that you could somehow cook your own head, but toxic Town Gas will poison you and you'd die. Britain used to see lots of suicides by this method. And then, not to prevent suicide but for simple economic reasons having discovered huge natural gas reserves in the North Sea, Britain switched to Natural Gas. Things had to be reconfigured, there are still left-over buildings and equipment littering the country decades later, but it just made obvious economic sense to switch. Natural Gas, however, though technically it could suffocate you, isn't poisonous and is very disinterested in remaining even a poorly ventilated kitchen, it just floats off. So people who lay down with their head in the oven after Natural Gas didn't die. They'd lay there, and eventually they'd realise this isn't working - and they would get up and get on with their lives. This _actually worked_ entirely by accident, the suicide rate dropped significantly. A natural experiment, and to refuse to learn from that is extremely dense.
  • yellowapple 7y ago
    > they are crazy and have fixated on a plan that would kill them And if guns aren't available, they'll fixate on a plan which does not involve them. The coal→natgas switch only worked to prevent suicides because (at least per your description) people still expected the gas to kill them; if suicidal people already know ahead of time that a particular strategy is not actually an option (e.g. because they know they can't get guns, or they know that the gas in their ovens ain't toxic), then they'll consider some other strategy in the "pick a strategy" stage of suicidal ideation. That is: this sort of "prevention" is temporary at best. Even in the UK, phasing out coal gas only decreased suicides specifically via carbon monoxide inhalation, while other methods of suicide rose in frequency [1]. The overall rate did decrease, but more for males than females (who readily seemed to start flocking toward other methods of suicide, at least per the graphs and the apparent far-more-modest decrease in overall suicide rate), and primarily only in England and Wales (Scotland's male suicide rate barely budged, and the female suicide rate held steady, with a visible switch from CO suicide to non-CO suicide in the graphs). Hangings are currently the most common means of suicide in the UK [2], with poisonings a close second among women. Neither of these are likely to go away any time soon without actually addressing why people feel inclined to self-terminate in the first place (unless you're going to propose trying to ban all alcohol and drugs - like the US tried (and failed) to do - and require background checks and mental health checks when buying ropes and bedsheets, and even that almost certainly won't be effective). [1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC478945/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC478945/ [2]: http://cebmh.warne.ox.ac.uk/csr/resmethods.html http://cebmh.warne.ox.ac.uk/csr/resmethods.html