6 ms·

40,000 suicides annually, yet America simply shrugs

89 points by robg 12y ago

ssprang 12y ago
Briggs saw the worst of this during suicide crises on the bridge when drivers passing by would yell out, "Go ahead and jump." Despicable.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  Regrettably this behavior appears to be protected by the first amendment, unless suicide itself is made illegal (as it used to be in many jurisdictions). A law criminalizing such behavior in Minnesota was reversed at appeal: http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2014/03/19/encouraging-suicide-isnt-a-crime-minnesota-court-says/ http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2014/03/19/encouraging-suicide-isnt... and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Francis_Melchert-Dinkel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Francis_Melchert-Dinkel I can't politely express my opinion about people like this.
  - Cthulhu_ 12y ago
    To paraphrase a popular movie / meme, "You're not a criminal, you're just an asshole".
  - shasta 12y ago
    Should they go kill themselves? Funny that the mental failings of the jumper evoke such sympathy and the mental failings of the "asshole" evoke such hatred.
    - golgappi 12y ago
      the asshole isn't killing himself/herself.
    - anigbrowl 12y ago
      There's a significant qualitative difference between someone being self-destructive (albeit with traumatic consequences for those who are connected to them) and engineering the destruction of someone else. There may be mental failings involved which are outside the control of the individual, but I don't think that's the whole story or we'd have to throw the idea of moral agency out the window (I picked the example I did because the person neither appeared nor claimed to suffer cognitive impairment AFAIK). We are actors as well as being acted upon by our environment and biology; insofar as our activities impact others, we have some responsibility to regulate them.
  - npizzolato 12y ago
    > Regrettably this behavior appears to be protected by the first amendment, Good. Free speech is far too important to restrict based on the actions of a few assholes.
    - dubfan 12y ago
      The best thing about free speech is that it lets us identify assholes easily.
- Fuxy 12y ago
  People are dicks, they don't care. You have to find the will and reason to live yourself if you really think life is that grim that you have to end it I have only one thing to say to you make sure you are 100% certain about that and there's no other way out of your situation before you do it this is one of the few things that cannot be undone. There's almost certainly better options you can try before doing this.
- unwind 12y ago
  When visiting the US this summer, we walked across the Golden Gate (which at the time didn't have the "anti-suicide rails" that I believe are planned). In several places there were both help phones and signs asking people to seek help, and also in one place there was graffiti on the pavement saying something like "somebody loves you". It was quite moving.
3fuff 12y ago
Even Atlas shrugged
bruceb 12y ago
"...the second-leading killer for those ages 15-34." I would have never guessed that. Now I can understand why some are trying to use social media to detect who might be expressing feeling that are common with depression and suicidal thoughts.
- imaginenore 12y ago
  And these are mostly males. Life for males really improves after 30. Girls starting to hit on you a lot more, better jobs, more money, less stress.
  - mqsiuser 12y ago
    You are right, BUT sorry, this is unpopular on hacker news Try to show that there is no difference between woman and men and you may get upvotes. Edit: And hey: Life for femals is much better between 16 and 35 (and deteriorates quickly after that). Man,... I know a lot of grumpy old woman.
  - mkr-hn 12y ago
    I'm only interested in 3/4 of these, and they're not happening[1]. When does the magic spell activate? [1] At least, not as fast as I'd like. Turns out we aren't all on the same path.
  - revdinosaur 12y ago
    Interesting, is this true for males of all species or is it limited to human males?
- gadders 12y ago
  I would expect the demographic to shift soon, due the momentum that assisted dying is getting.
  - thaumasiotes 12y ago
    The demographic of "people dying by suicide variously defined" may shift, but that won't have any effect on the leading causes of death for ages 15-34. It's a safe world out there now; young people generally don't die.
gadders 12y ago
I read an article once that said that when suicide was illegal in the UK, the rate was a lot lower. I'm not sure if that was true or not, but as a thought experiment: if making suicide illegal lowered it's occurrance, would you support that?
- alex_hitchins 12y ago
  I believe when it was illegal here in the UK, coroners would look for ways to record the death in more favourable ways (mostly for the family). So an overdose would be recorded as death by misadventure and not suicide.
  - raverbashing 12y ago
    Exactly this This type of law is only good to make people misreport things. Accidents/Misadventures/Suspected murder etc
- ninguem2 12y ago
  It is a terrible idea. What are the consequences? Punishment for those who attempt and fail or punishment for the families of those who succeed by denying them life insurance, proper burial and so on.
  - gadders 12y ago
    I think people who tried and failed may have been punished. AFAIK, life insurance has never paid out for suicide and doesn't now.
    - pravda 12y ago
      >life insurance has never paid out for suicide and doesn't now. In the USA, life insurance does cover suicide, as long as it is not within 2 years of the issue date.
- npizzolato 12y ago
  I don't know how you would possibly go about making suicide illegal, but punishing those left behind sounds like the worst possible "solution" to suicide.
tim333 12y ago
I think there should be a move towards targeting government policies that improve the numbers on measures like suicide and reported happiness. There are quite a lot of stats out there and they vary a lot from country to country - Wikipedia has Lithuania at 31 suicides per 100k per year, Greece at 3.5 and the UK and US in the middle somewhere around 12. You could try figuring what make the difference (perhaps with regression analysis?) and implementing policies to make it more like Greece and less like Lithuania perhaps.
- tokenadult 12y ago
  One of the differences that jumps out at me about Lithuania and Greece is climate. I first learned about the importance of daylight for preventing depression (and thus suicide) from an Internet comment about twenty years ago when I wondered why Canada's rate of completed suicide is as high as it is, even though I would have guessed that its access to guns for young people might be a little less than in the United States. The answer, given to me by a Canadian scientist, is that Canada is nearer to the North Pole and farther from the Equator, and so it has a long winter season with little daylight. In the old days, before United Nations statistics were on the World Wide Web, I actually went to a university library and looked up thick physical volumes of World Health Organisation statistics. The general relationship between polar latitude and high suicide rate, and equatorial latitude and lower suicide rate, holds up worldwide, with some exceptional-looking cases mostly explained by cloudiness. Low exposure to outdoor light is a suicide risk, and high exposure to cheery sunshine is a protective factor against suicide (but can lead to mania, known as "running amok" in some equatorial places). The author of the poem "Home on the Range" knew this: a place "Where seldom is heard a discouraging word / And the sky is not cloudy all day" like the Great Plains is protective against depression and suicide.
thaumasiotes 12y ago
> Each suicide costs society about $1 million in medical and lost-work expenses and emotionally victimizes an average of 10 other people. So... the 10 other people emotionally victimized is an average figure, but the $1 million in medical costs isn't? How does finding a dead body rack up any medical expenses?
- jimcsharp 12y ago
  Medical and lost work. 10 people who may take days of leave, 10+ person days lost for funeral, 1 person a company needs to replace.
  - Cthulhu_ 12y ago
    Depending on the method of suicide, clean-up. A popular way to go here in NL seems to be to jump in front of a train. Traumatized train personnel, a train full of people delayed for hours, loads of clean-up, etc. Jumping off the Golden Gate bridge seems to be relatively clean in comparison.
  - thaumasiotes 12y ago
    Taking a day of leave doesn't cause any lost-work expenses, under the standard system of "you get this much leave, and it doesn't roll over". If I take 15 days off in a year, the number of days I work is totally unaffected by whether one of the days off was spent at a funeral, or in some other way. Say an unemployed 17-year-old kills himself and his funeral is held on a Sunday. I don't think that's a huge stretch, but it results in no days of leave, no work days lost to a funeral, and no sudden job opening needing to be filled. And clean-up, like Cthulhu_ mentions, isn't a lost-work expense, it's an additional-work expense.
    - MacsHeadroom 12y ago
      No, it's standard for Bereavement leave to come separably from normal paid time off, similar to maternity leave. It almost never comes from the same "days off" bucket. https://www.google.com/search?q=bereavement+leave+law https://www.google.com/search?q=bereavement+leave+law
tokenadult 12y ago
This is a very thoughtful article, which I see is part of a series from the same publication about suicide. There is good information here. One paragraph jumped out at me: "Some states allow for court-ordered treatment plans. No studies have been done on whether this could prevent suicides, another example of gaps in knowledge, Caine says. Such ideas, he says, lie 'at the edge of what we know and what we don't know.'" Ugh, so even rather basic research on what might help hasn't been tried yet. We need to know more to do more. The article also included some inspiring examples, including an Army officer who had come close to suicide himself about seven years ago during a combat deployment. "Today, he cannot recover from colon cancer diagnosed in 2012 that doctors declared terminal last year. In June, they said he had only months left. Faced with his own mortality, Fitch consulted his wife, Samantha Wolk, and reflected on the 22 veteran suicides occurring each day. He chose to devote his remaining time to prevent others from committing suicide. "'I've always wanted to focus on trying to leave the world a better place,' he says." Martin E. P. Seligman, in his book The Optimistic Child,[1] reviews some of the research current to about a decade ago about "self-esteem" programs in schools. They have long been known to be dangerous. The rising suicide rate compared to earlier birth cohorts in the United States suggests that young people in my generation and younger were not exposed in childhood to "optimism" as Seligman defines it but rather to "self-esteem" thinking, which doesn't leave people with enough inner strength to face a lot of challenges in life. Changing our thinking about what kind of thinking builds resilience in young people would help prevent suicide (and help everyone enjoy life better). There is already research on this, and we should apply it more. [1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Optimistic-Child-Depression-Resilience/dp/0618918094 http://www.amazon.com/The-Optimistic-Child-Depression-Resili...
zimpenfish 12y ago
How much does the US spend on anti-terrorism activities[1] (which is, finger in the air, maybe 5000 people killed in 15 years?) compared to their mental health system (6500 people dead every -two months-)? [1] It's about $40bn. http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/factsheet_department_homeland/ http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/factsheet_department_homeland/
- pjc50 12y ago
  The US spends a considerable number of lives on "anti-terrorism" combat, as well.
  - zimpenfish 12y ago
    An excellent adjunct-point.
bproctor 12y ago
I probably have an unpopular opinion on this, but I feel that people who wish to commit suicide should not be prevented from doing so. By all means, if someone wants to get help or needs counseling they should be able to get it. But if in the end their choice is suicide, we should be making it easier for them, not harder. I think that if I ever wanted to commit suicide I would be less likely to seek counseling out of fear I would be "prevented" from making my own choices. Similarly, when an animal is critically injured we "put them out of their misery" because that's the "humane" thing to do. But us humans, we have to suffer to the very end. Why?
- k-mcgrady 12y ago
  You seem to be forgetting that for a lot of these people it wasn't really a choice. Their mind was malfunctioning and led them to do something they probably wouldn't have a few months later if they received the right help. Your argument about animals is more related to assisted dying/euthanasia which probably represents a very small number of these suicides and is a separate discussion I feel.
  - thaumasiotes 12y ago
    > You seem to be forgetting that for a lot of these people it wasn't really a choice. Their mind was malfunctioning and led them to do something they probably wouldn't have a few months later This argument proves a little too much.
- jamestanderson 12y ago
  But if your choices are because you suffer from a mental illness such as depression, should we as a society just "shrug" and say "Well, it's their choice, let them do whatever they want." ? I don't think so - especially when a lot of times, due to their illness, they cannot make their own choice.
  - sgift 12y ago
    The problem starts when you get into "is this a state of mind or an illness?" territory. I've heard the argument that people who have the wish to commit suicide are by definition mentally ill and should therefore be prevented from doing it even if we don't know which mental illness they suffer from.
headShrinker 12y ago
Frankly, I'm surprized that this is seemingly the first mention of this... "The Suicide Prevention Resource Center synthesized these studies and estimated that between 30 and 40% of LGBT youth, depending on age and sex groups, have attempted suicide." Source: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_among_LGBT_youth http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_among_LGBT_youth I hope I just missed the reference somewhere in the piece or these comments.
- tokenadult 12y ago
  I went to the website of the organization you mentioned. I browsed and then searched that website. A link there took me to another organization, the American Association of Suicidology, at first to a dead link, then I browsed and searched that organization's website, and found a fact sheet on the issue you bring up.[1] The fact sheet mentions some studies and their conclusions, without detailed citations or descriptions of methodology, and points out "Because no reliable data exists, we do not know whether LGBT youth die by suicide more frequently than their straight peers. Sexual orientation and gender identity data are not included on death certificates so aggregated national death data do not include this information. In addition, many LGBT youth do not disclose this information to family members and friends; as a result, sexual orientation and gender identity often do not show up in psychological autopsy interviews." In other words, we are not completely sure that LGBT status is a risk factor for completed suicide in the United States, although that is the current working hypothesis among many suicide researchers. As the article submitted to open the thread here today makes clear, there is a lot of basis research on suicide that still needs to be done. [1] http://www.suicidology.org/Portals/14/docs/Resources/LGBT%20Resources/SuicidalBehaviorAmongLGBTYouthFacts.pdf http://www.suicidology.org/Portals/14/docs/Resources/LGBT%20...
CapitalistCartr 12y ago
America is NOT doing nothing. America is not synonymous with the Federal gov't. We as a people do a lot outside of Federal gov't spending.
robbiep 12y ago
40,000 is an awfully large number but it is less than the number of gun deaths in the US (put at around 50-60,000 depending on the sources), which would be much easier to prevent
- lmz 12y ago
  Most gun deaths in the US are suicides. [1] [1]: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/05/24/suicides-account-for-most-gun-deaths/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/05/24/suicides-acc...
- kirsebaer 12y ago
  16,000 homicides total (firearm or otherwise) in the US in 2011. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm
feld 12y ago
Razors pain you; Rivers are damp; Acids stain you; And drugs cause cramp. Guns aren't lawful; Nooses give; Gas smells awful; You might as well live. -- Dorothy Parker, "Resume", 1926
kirsebaer 12y ago
One in a 100 people in the US will die by suicide. It's a common cause of death. Could suicide and depression be a response to civilization and modernity? This article cites some evidence that the suicide rate was much lower among various groups of hunter-gatherers: http://www.academia.edu/4777783/Suicide_Among_the_Mla_Bri_Hunter-Gatherers_of_Northern_Thailand_by_Mary_Long_Eugene_Long_and_Tony_Waters http://www.academia.edu/4777783/Suicide_Among_the_Mla_Bri_Hu...
s_baby 12y ago
America shrugs because suicide is a problem effecting men. Men outnumber women in suicide between 3:1 and 10:1[1]. If the tables were turned you better believe you would hear about it. The NFL would wear pink ribbons to raise awareness. You would constantly see articles relating patriarchy and female suicide. But these people killing themselves are men. These people are privileged and therefore are not being driven by controllable outside factors into suicide like some marginalized group. This is why I find the term privilege getting thrown around so offensive. The problem isn't that it lacks validity(it has some). The problem is we're trying to build an inclusive society and calling someone privileged is now a way to marginalize the needs and perspectives of others. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_differences_in_suicide http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_differences_in_suicide
jczhang 12y ago
A month ago I was in San Diego and a homeless guy walking past me told me he was trying he kill himself and was looking for the path to the bridge. He kept walking, passing by a police officer. I told the police officer he might want to keep an eye on the guy and told him that he was trying to kill himself. The officer just said, "He should try harder." I was shocked.

89 points by robg 12y ago

Briggs saw the worst of this during suicide crises on the bridge when drivers passing by would yell out, "Go ahead and jump." Despicable.

anigbrowl 12y ago
Regrettably this behavior appears to be protected by the first amendment, unless suicide itself is made illegal (as it used to be in many jurisdictions). A law criminalizing such behavior in Minnesota was reversed at appeal: http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2014/03/19/encouraging-suicide-isnt-a-crime-minnesota-court-says/ http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2014/03/19/encouraging-suicide-isnt... and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Francis_Melchert-Dinkel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Francis_Melchert-Dinkel I can't politely express my opinion about people like this.
- Cthulhu_ 12y ago
  To paraphrase a popular movie / meme, "You're not a criminal, you're just an asshole".
- shasta 12y ago
  Should they go kill themselves? Funny that the mental failings of the jumper evoke such sympathy and the mental failings of the "asshole" evoke such hatred.
  - golgappi 12y ago
    the asshole isn't killing himself/herself.
  - anigbrowl 12y ago
    There's a significant qualitative difference between someone being self-destructive (albeit with traumatic consequences for those who are connected to them) and engineering the destruction of someone else. There may be mental failings involved which are outside the control of the individual, but I don't think that's the whole story or we'd have to throw the idea of moral agency out the window (I picked the example I did because the person neither appeared nor claimed to suffer cognitive impairment AFAIK). We are actors as well as being acted upon by our environment and biology; insofar as our activities impact others, we have some responsibility to regulate them.
- npizzolato 12y ago
  > Regrettably this behavior appears to be protected by the first amendment, Good. Free speech is far too important to restrict based on the actions of a few assholes.
  - dubfan 12y ago
    The best thing about free speech is that it lets us identify assholes easily.
Fuxy 12y ago
People are dicks, they don't care. You have to find the will and reason to live yourself if you really think life is that grim that you have to end it I have only one thing to say to you make sure you are 100% certain about that and there's no other way out of your situation before you do it this is one of the few things that cannot be undone. There's almost certainly better options you can try before doing this.
unwind 12y ago
When visiting the US this summer, we walked across the Golden Gate (which at the time didn't have the "anti-suicide rails" that I believe are planned). In several places there were both help phones and signs asking people to seek help, and also in one place there was graffiti on the pavement saying something like "somebody loves you". It was quite moving.

3fuff 12y ago

Even Atlas shrugged

bruceb 12y ago

"...the second-leading killer for those ages 15-34." I would have never guessed that. Now I can understand why some are trying to use social media to detect who might be expressing feeling that are common with depression and suicidal thoughts.

imaginenore 12y ago
And these are mostly males. Life for males really improves after 30. Girls starting to hit on you a lot more, better jobs, more money, less stress.
- mqsiuser 12y ago
  You are right, BUT sorry, this is unpopular on hacker news Try to show that there is no difference between woman and men and you may get upvotes. Edit: And hey: Life for femals is much better between 16 and 35 (and deteriorates quickly after that). Man,... I know a lot of grumpy old woman.
- mkr-hn 12y ago
  I'm only interested in 3/4 of these, and they're not happening[1]. When does the magic spell activate? [1] At least, not as fast as I'd like. Turns out we aren't all on the same path.
- revdinosaur 12y ago
  Interesting, is this true for males of all species or is it limited to human males?
gadders 12y ago
I would expect the demographic to shift soon, due the momentum that assisted dying is getting.
- thaumasiotes 12y ago
  The demographic of "people dying by suicide variously defined" may shift, but that won't have any effect on the leading causes of death for ages 15-34. It's a safe world out there now; young people generally don't die.

gadders 12y ago

I read an article once that said that when suicide was illegal in the UK, the rate was a lot lower. I'm not sure if that was true or not, but as a thought experiment: if making suicide illegal lowered it's occurrance, would you support that?

alex_hitchins 12y ago
I believe when it was illegal here in the UK, coroners would look for ways to record the death in more favourable ways (mostly for the family). So an overdose would be recorded as death by misadventure and not suicide.
- raverbashing 12y ago
  Exactly this This type of law is only good to make people misreport things. Accidents/Misadventures/Suspected murder etc
ninguem2 12y ago
It is a terrible idea. What are the consequences? Punishment for those who attempt and fail or punishment for the families of those who succeed by denying them life insurance, proper burial and so on.
- gadders 12y ago
  I think people who tried and failed may have been punished. AFAIK, life insurance has never paid out for suicide and doesn't now.
  - pravda 12y ago
    >life insurance has never paid out for suicide and doesn't now. In the USA, life insurance does cover suicide, as long as it is not within 2 years of the issue date.
npizzolato 12y ago
I don't know how you would possibly go about making suicide illegal, but punishing those left behind sounds like the worst possible "solution" to suicide.

tim333 12y ago

I think there should be a move towards targeting government policies that improve the numbers on measures like suicide and reported happiness. There are quite a lot of stats out there and they vary a lot from country to country - Wikipedia has Lithuania at 31 suicides per 100k per year, Greece at 3.5 and the UK and US in the middle somewhere around 12. You could try figuring what make the difference (perhaps with regression analysis?) and implementing policies to make it more like Greece and less like Lithuania perhaps.

tokenadult 12y ago
One of the differences that jumps out at me about Lithuania and Greece is climate. I first learned about the importance of daylight for preventing depression (and thus suicide) from an Internet comment about twenty years ago when I wondered why Canada's rate of completed suicide is as high as it is, even though I would have guessed that its access to guns for young people might be a little less than in the United States. The answer, given to me by a Canadian scientist, is that Canada is nearer to the North Pole and farther from the Equator, and so it has a long winter season with little daylight. In the old days, before United Nations statistics were on the World Wide Web, I actually went to a university library and looked up thick physical volumes of World Health Organisation statistics. The general relationship between polar latitude and high suicide rate, and equatorial latitude and lower suicide rate, holds up worldwide, with some exceptional-looking cases mostly explained by cloudiness. Low exposure to outdoor light is a suicide risk, and high exposure to cheery sunshine is a protective factor against suicide (but can lead to mania, known as "running amok" in some equatorial places). The author of the poem "Home on the Range" knew this: a place "Where seldom is heard a discouraging word / And the sky is not cloudy all day" like the Great Plains is protective against depression and suicide.

thaumasiotes 12y ago

> Each suicide costs society about $1 million in medical and lost-work expenses and emotionally victimizes an average of 10 other people. So... the 10 other people emotionally victimized is an average figure, but the $1 million in medical costs isn't? How does finding a dead body rack up any medical expenses?

jimcsharp 12y ago
Medical and lost work. 10 people who may take days of leave, 10+ person days lost for funeral, 1 person a company needs to replace.
- Cthulhu_ 12y ago
  Depending on the method of suicide, clean-up. A popular way to go here in NL seems to be to jump in front of a train. Traumatized train personnel, a train full of people delayed for hours, loads of clean-up, etc. Jumping off the Golden Gate bridge seems to be relatively clean in comparison.
- thaumasiotes 12y ago
  Taking a day of leave doesn't cause any lost-work expenses, under the standard system of "you get this much leave, and it doesn't roll over". If I take 15 days off in a year, the number of days I work is totally unaffected by whether one of the days off was spent at a funeral, or in some other way. Say an unemployed 17-year-old kills himself and his funeral is held on a Sunday. I don't think that's a huge stretch, but it results in no days of leave, no work days lost to a funeral, and no sudden job opening needing to be filled. And clean-up, like Cthulhu_ mentions, isn't a lost-work expense, it's an additional-work expense.
  - MacsHeadroom 12y ago
    No, it's standard for Bereavement leave to come separably from normal paid time off, similar to maternity leave. It almost never comes from the same "days off" bucket. https://www.google.com/search?q=bereavement+leave+law https://www.google.com/search?q=bereavement+leave+law

tokenadult 12y ago

This is a very thoughtful article, which I see is part of a series from the same publication about suicide. There is good information here. One paragraph jumped out at me: "Some states allow for court-ordered treatment plans. No studies have been done on whether this could prevent suicides, another example of gaps in knowledge, Caine says. Such ideas, he says, lie 'at the edge of what we know and what we don't know.'" Ugh, so even rather basic research on what might help hasn't been tried yet. We need to know more to do more. The article also included some inspiring examples, including an Army officer who had come close to suicide himself about seven years ago during a combat deployment. "Today, he cannot recover from colon cancer diagnosed in 2012 that doctors declared terminal last year. In June, they said he had only months left. Faced with his own mortality, Fitch consulted his wife, Samantha Wolk, and reflected on the 22 veteran suicides occurring each day. He chose to devote his remaining time to prevent others from committing suicide. "'I've always wanted to focus on trying to leave the world a better place,' he says." Martin E. P. Seligman, in his book The Optimistic Child,[1] reviews some of the research current to about a decade ago about "self-esteem" programs in schools. They have long been known to be dangerous. The rising suicide rate compared to earlier birth cohorts in the United States suggests that young people in my generation and younger were not exposed in childhood to "optimism" as Seligman defines it but rather to "self-esteem" thinking, which doesn't leave people with enough inner strength to face a lot of challenges in life. Changing our thinking about what kind of thinking builds resilience in young people would help prevent suicide (and help everyone enjoy life better). There is already research on this, and we should apply it more. [1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Optimistic-Child-Depression-Resilience/dp/0618918094 http://www.amazon.com/The-Optimistic-Child-Depression-Resili...

zimpenfish 12y ago

How much does the US spend on anti-terrorism activities[1] (which is, finger in the air, maybe 5000 people killed in 15 years?) compared to their mental health system (6500 people dead every -two months-)? [1] It's about $40bn. http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/factsheet_department_homeland/ http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/factsheet_department_homeland/

pjc50 12y ago
The US spends a considerable number of lives on "anti-terrorism" combat, as well.
- zimpenfish 12y ago
  An excellent adjunct-point.

bproctor 12y ago

I probably have an unpopular opinion on this, but I feel that people who wish to commit suicide should not be prevented from doing so. By all means, if someone wants to get help or needs counseling they should be able to get it. But if in the end their choice is suicide, we should be making it easier for them, not harder. I think that if I ever wanted to commit suicide I would be less likely to seek counseling out of fear I would be "prevented" from making my own choices. Similarly, when an animal is critically injured we "put them out of their misery" because that's the "humane" thing to do. But us humans, we have to suffer to the very end. Why?

k-mcgrady 12y ago
You seem to be forgetting that for a lot of these people it wasn't really a choice. Their mind was malfunctioning and led them to do something they probably wouldn't have a few months later if they received the right help. Your argument about animals is more related to assisted dying/euthanasia which probably represents a very small number of these suicides and is a separate discussion I feel.
- thaumasiotes 12y ago
  > You seem to be forgetting that for a lot of these people it wasn't really a choice. Their mind was malfunctioning and led them to do something they probably wouldn't have a few months later This argument proves a little too much.
jamestanderson 12y ago
But if your choices are because you suffer from a mental illness such as depression, should we as a society just "shrug" and say "Well, it's their choice, let them do whatever they want." ? I don't think so - especially when a lot of times, due to their illness, they cannot make their own choice.
- sgift 12y ago
  The problem starts when you get into "is this a state of mind or an illness?" territory. I've heard the argument that people who have the wish to commit suicide are by definition mentally ill and should therefore be prevented from doing it even if we don't know which mental illness they suffer from.

headShrinker 12y ago

Frankly, I'm surprized that this is seemingly the first mention of this... "The Suicide Prevention Resource Center synthesized these studies and estimated that between 30 and 40% of LGBT youth, depending on age and sex groups, have attempted suicide." Source: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_among_LGBT_youth http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_among_LGBT_youth I hope I just missed the reference somewhere in the piece or these comments.

tokenadult 12y ago
I went to the website of the organization you mentioned. I browsed and then searched that website. A link there took me to another organization, the American Association of Suicidology, at first to a dead link, then I browsed and searched that organization's website, and found a fact sheet on the issue you bring up.[1] The fact sheet mentions some studies and their conclusions, without detailed citations or descriptions of methodology, and points out "Because no reliable data exists, we do not know whether LGBT youth die by suicide more frequently than their straight peers. Sexual orientation and gender identity data are not included on death certificates so aggregated national death data do not include this information. In addition, many LGBT youth do not disclose this information to family members and friends; as a result, sexual orientation and gender identity often do not show up in psychological autopsy interviews." In other words, we are not completely sure that LGBT status is a risk factor for completed suicide in the United States, although that is the current working hypothesis among many suicide researchers. As the article submitted to open the thread here today makes clear, there is a lot of basis research on suicide that still needs to be done. [1] http://www.suicidology.org/Portals/14/docs/Resources/LGBT%20Resources/SuicidalBehaviorAmongLGBTYouthFacts.pdf http://www.suicidology.org/Portals/14/docs/Resources/LGBT%20...

CapitalistCartr 12y ago

America is NOT doing nothing. America is not synonymous with the Federal gov't. We as a people do a lot outside of Federal gov't spending.

robbiep 12y ago

40,000 is an awfully large number but it is less than the number of gun deaths in the US (put at around 50-60,000 depending on the sources), which would be much easier to prevent

lmz 12y ago
Most gun deaths in the US are suicides. [1] [1]: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/05/24/suicides-account-for-most-gun-deaths/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/05/24/suicides-acc...
kirsebaer 12y ago
16,000 homicides total (firearm or otherwise) in the US in 2011. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm

feld 12y ago

Razors pain you; Rivers are damp; Acids stain you; And drugs cause cramp. Guns aren't lawful; Nooses give; Gas smells awful; You might as well live. -- Dorothy Parker, "Resume", 1926

kirsebaer 12y ago

One in a 100 people in the US will die by suicide. It's a common cause of death. Could suicide and depression be a response to civilization and modernity? This article cites some evidence that the suicide rate was much lower among various groups of hunter-gatherers: http://www.academia.edu/4777783/Suicide_Among_the_Mla_Bri_Hunter-Gatherers_of_Northern_Thailand_by_Mary_Long_Eugene_Long_and_Tony_Waters http://www.academia.edu/4777783/Suicide_Among_the_Mla_Bri_Hu...

s_baby 12y ago

America shrugs because suicide is a problem effecting men. Men outnumber women in suicide between 3:1 and 10:1[1]. If the tables were turned you better believe you would hear about it. The NFL would wear pink ribbons to raise awareness. You would constantly see articles relating patriarchy and female suicide. But these people killing themselves are men. These people are privileged and therefore are not being driven by controllable outside factors into suicide like some marginalized group. This is why I find the term privilege getting thrown around so offensive. The problem isn't that it lacks validity(it has some). The problem is we're trying to build an inclusive society and calling someone privileged is now a way to marginalize the needs and perspectives of others. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_differences_in_suicide http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_differences_in_suicide

jczhang 12y ago

A month ago I was in San Diego and a homeless guy walking past me told me he was trying he kill himself and was looking for the path to the bridge. He kept walking, passing by a police officer. I told the police officer he might want to keep an eye on the guy and told him that he was trying to kill himself. The officer just said, "He should try harder." I was shocked.