8 ms·

Suicide rates climbing, especially in rural America

50 points by EndXA 7y ago

Cyder 7y ago
Regardless of where one lives in America, chronic disease sufferers can't get pain relief anymore. Everyone has a breaking point and the fake opioid crisis has taken away the ability to live with chronic diseases that have pain as an effect.
- condercet 7y ago
  You are misinformed and pushing an unproductive narrative. From the Center of Disease Control: https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/index.html "Drug overdose deaths continue to increase in the United States. From 1999 to 2017, more than 702,000 people have died from a drug overdose. In 2017, more than 70,000 people died from drug overdoses, making it a leading cause of injury-related death in the United States. Of those deaths, almost 68% involved a prescription or illicit opioid." Pain management may be a problem, but the opioid epidemic is very real.
eng888888 7y ago
No animal commits suicide, that's why suicide is the ultimate triumph of evolution.
honkycat 7y ago
I come from a rural community in midwest United States. It is rough. All of the factories closed. Then all of the small businesses closed. Then all of the grocery stores closed. We now have to drive almost an hour to the local Wal-Mart to get our groceries. The crime rate sky-rocketed, job rates feel, and everything went to pot. [0] It is grim. I am very fortunate I arbitrarily chose "Computer Science" for my college degree. I make extremely good money. I could have easily ended up back in my small town trying to make ends meet. Observation: A lot of my friends did not make it out and are doing great. A lot of my other friends are NOT. One false move and you are stuck with a degree nobody wants, working a shitty nowhere job to survive, and not enough time or energy to change careers. IMO, The rise of the "alt-right" and general dissatisfaction in modern America comes from the same place: The jobs suck, the retirement sucks, the communities are car-hell, you work yourself into the grave to make someone else money and get very little back. My family ran funeral homes for years, made decent money. Now my parents are in their 50s and disaster after disaster have drained their bank accounts. The community went broke, so we went broke. Thankfully, they managed to get regular 9-5 jobs around the community to support themselves, but it feels like everybody is constantly walking on a tight-rope, and one more stiff breeze is going to upset everything. 0: https://www.areavibes.com/keokuk-ia/crime/ https://www.areavibes.com/keokuk-ia/crime/
- tlobes 7y ago
  https://www.jstor.org/stable/40600593 https://www.jstor.org/stable/40600593 Similar story in the Weimar Republic from 1918-1933
  - sitkack 7y ago
    The movement you should fear is the right wing politician that deposes Trump.
    - googlesux 7y ago
      So if a Ted Cruz character beat Trump we should fear this
  - mancerayder 7y ago
    Minus the detail of the years following a major war. The devastation isn't comparable to the Rust Belt economic story.
- TuringNYC 7y ago
  Honest question: why do many of these communities continue to vote for “pull yourselves up from your bootstraps” conservative politicians and reject “help a man when he’s down” progressive politicians? It seems what these communities need is a helping hand, better educational options, and healthcare safety nets.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - cheez 7y ago
    You're thinking about it the wrong way. They vote for people who promise not to take even more from them.
  - Sojuwa 7y ago
    Not exactly excited to jump at the party that unfairly blanket paints of them as redneck white supremacist Nazi idiots. Doubly so since they masquerade as intersectional saviors of humanity while doing so.
wtdata 7y ago
"Suicides were most common among men and those 45 to 54 years old."
rrggrr 7y ago
This disproportionately impact men and boys. Can't recommend "The Boy Crisis" enough as a must read. Or at least this TED talk: https://youtu.be/Qi1oN1icAYc https://youtu.be/Qi1oN1icAYc
- Merrill 7y ago
  A similar study on attempted suicides would be interesting. IIRC, the rates of attempted suicides are more equal between men and women, but women fail more often since they use less effective means. There must also be a large number of people who drink or smoke themselves to death or who overdose on drugs, and effectively commit suicide.
  - wutbrodo 7y ago
    > IIRC, the rates of attempted suicides are more equal between men and women, but women fail more often since they use less effective means. It's a tricky stat to disentangle, as an attempted suicide gives us slightly different statistical information than a completed one. Namely, the odds that it was a "cry-for-help" attempt vs a serious one are naturally far lower for completed suicides. These are of course important in and of themselves, but it would be valuable to be able to tease out the two separate phenomena. That is to say, looking only at attempted suicides fails to capture the full picture in the way that looking only at completed ones does, but there's no easy way to disentangle the data we're actually interested in.
lota-putty 7y ago
Are there any effective solutions that work to counter suicides?
Merrill 7y ago
Contextual Factors Associated With County-Level Suicide Rates in the United States, 1999 to 2016 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2749451 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
HgonnaH 7y ago
Well, they are all big fans of the bootstrap. Let them hang on it.
- wutbrodo 7y ago
  My Lord, I can't even imagine what it must feel like to be so filled with hatred that your reaction to a suicide crisis is that arbitrary victims are due collective punishment from the overall political attitudes of their region. You must be more bile than human at this point. I hope you find a way to be happy some day. FWIW, I am and always have been in an extremely "urban elite", internationalist bubble, so I have no direct or even indirect exposure to people from rural areas. I'm just, uh, not a garbage person.
NTDF9 7y ago
To me, all these problem and more seem to come straight out of our monetary and fiscal policies. 1. Fed pumping so much money drove up useless asset prices. Which means people are spending more and more of their income towards paying for expensive assets which are all owned by a fraction of the rich. This rent-seeking is drawing money away from small businesses and small scale production 2. Tax cut on the rich. Now that asset prices are beyond comprehension and people are spending so much money enriching the rich, the least we could've had was tax the rich and recycle into rural infrastructure projects. But no, we gave the rich a tax break, furthering the asset price rise. Even today,most people are just paying more and more towards rent. The rich have completely bought this country.

50 points by EndXA 7y ago

Regardless of where one lives in America, chronic disease sufferers can't get pain relief anymore. Everyone has a breaking point and the fake opioid crisis has taken away the ability to live with chronic diseases that have pain as an effect.

condercet 7y ago
You are misinformed and pushing an unproductive narrative. From the Center of Disease Control: https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/index.html "Drug overdose deaths continue to increase in the United States. From 1999 to 2017, more than 702,000 people have died from a drug overdose. In 2017, more than 70,000 people died from drug overdoses, making it a leading cause of injury-related death in the United States. Of those deaths, almost 68% involved a prescription or illicit opioid." Pain management may be a problem, but the opioid epidemic is very real.

eng888888 7y ago

No animal commits suicide, that's why suicide is the ultimate triumph of evolution.

honkycat 7y ago

I come from a rural community in midwest United States. It is rough. All of the factories closed. Then all of the small businesses closed. Then all of the grocery stores closed. We now have to drive almost an hour to the local Wal-Mart to get our groceries. The crime rate sky-rocketed, job rates feel, and everything went to pot. [0] It is grim. I am very fortunate I arbitrarily chose "Computer Science" for my college degree. I make extremely good money. I could have easily ended up back in my small town trying to make ends meet. Observation: A lot of my friends did not make it out and are doing great. A lot of my other friends are NOT. One false move and you are stuck with a degree nobody wants, working a shitty nowhere job to survive, and not enough time or energy to change careers. IMO, The rise of the "alt-right" and general dissatisfaction in modern America comes from the same place: The jobs suck, the retirement sucks, the communities are car-hell, you work yourself into the grave to make someone else money and get very little back. My family ran funeral homes for years, made decent money. Now my parents are in their 50s and disaster after disaster have drained their bank accounts. The community went broke, so we went broke. Thankfully, they managed to get regular 9-5 jobs around the community to support themselves, but it feels like everybody is constantly walking on a tight-rope, and one more stiff breeze is going to upset everything. 0: https://www.areavibes.com/keokuk-ia/crime/ https://www.areavibes.com/keokuk-ia/crime/

tlobes 7y ago
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40600593 https://www.jstor.org/stable/40600593 Similar story in the Weimar Republic from 1918-1933
- sitkack 7y ago
  The movement you should fear is the right wing politician that deposes Trump.
  - googlesux 7y ago
    So if a Ted Cruz character beat Trump we should fear this
- mancerayder 7y ago
  Minus the detail of the years following a major war. The devastation isn't comparable to the Rust Belt economic story.
TuringNYC 7y ago
Honest question: why do many of these communities continue to vote for “pull yourselves up from your bootstraps” conservative politicians and reject “help a man when he’s down” progressive politicians? It seems what these communities need is a helping hand, better educational options, and healthcare safety nets.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- cheez 7y ago
  You're thinking about it the wrong way. They vote for people who promise not to take even more from them.
- Sojuwa 7y ago
  Not exactly excited to jump at the party that unfairly blanket paints of them as redneck white supremacist Nazi idiots. Doubly so since they masquerade as intersectional saviors of humanity while doing so.

wtdata 7y ago

"Suicides were most common among men and those 45 to 54 years old."

rrggrr 7y ago

This disproportionately impact men and boys. Can't recommend "The Boy Crisis" enough as a must read. Or at least this TED talk: https://youtu.be/Qi1oN1icAYc https://youtu.be/Qi1oN1icAYc

Merrill 7y ago
A similar study on attempted suicides would be interesting. IIRC, the rates of attempted suicides are more equal between men and women, but women fail more often since they use less effective means. There must also be a large number of people who drink or smoke themselves to death or who overdose on drugs, and effectively commit suicide.
- wutbrodo 7y ago
  > IIRC, the rates of attempted suicides are more equal between men and women, but women fail more often since they use less effective means. It's a tricky stat to disentangle, as an attempted suicide gives us slightly different statistical information than a completed one. Namely, the odds that it was a "cry-for-help" attempt vs a serious one are naturally far lower for completed suicides. These are of course important in and of themselves, but it would be valuable to be able to tease out the two separate phenomena. That is to say, looking only at attempted suicides fails to capture the full picture in the way that looking only at completed ones does, but there's no easy way to disentangle the data we're actually interested in.

lota-putty 7y ago

Are there any effective solutions that work to counter suicides?

Merrill 7y ago

Contextual Factors Associated With County-Level Suicide Rates in the United States, 1999 to 2016 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2749451 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

HgonnaH 7y ago

Well, they are all big fans of the bootstrap. Let them hang on it.

wutbrodo 7y ago
My Lord, I can't even imagine what it must feel like to be so filled with hatred that your reaction to a suicide crisis is that arbitrary victims are due collective punishment from the overall political attitudes of their region. You must be more bile than human at this point. I hope you find a way to be happy some day. FWIW, I am and always have been in an extremely "urban elite", internationalist bubble, so I have no direct or even indirect exposure to people from rural areas. I'm just, uh, not a garbage person.

NTDF9 7y ago

To me, all these problem and more seem to come straight out of our monetary and fiscal policies. 1. Fed pumping so much money drove up useless asset prices. Which means people are spending more and more of their income towards paying for expensive assets which are all owned by a fraction of the rich. This rent-seeking is drawing money away from small businesses and small scale production 2. Tax cut on the rich. Now that asset prices are beyond comprehension and people are spending so much money enriching the rich, the least we could've had was tax the rich and recycle into rural infrastructure projects. But no, we gave the rich a tax break, furthering the asset price rise. Even today,most people are just paying more and more towards rent. The rich have completely bought this country.