700
US suicides hit an all-time high last year
(english.elpais.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
700 points (97.4% liked)
World News
39202 readers
523 users here now
A community for discussing events around the World
Rules:
-
Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
- Title must match the article headline
- Not United States Internal News
- Recent (Past 30 Days)
- Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
-
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
-
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed. Sources that have a Low or Very Low factual reporting rating or MBFC Credibility Rating may be removed.
-
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
-
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF 10/19
-
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
-
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
-
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
Lemmy World Partners
News !news@lemmy.world
Politics !politics@lemmy.world
World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world
Recommendations
For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/
- Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Everytime I see suicide statistics like these. I don't think of the deaths. I think of the misery each individual must have experienced in order to come to the conclusion that death was better.
Then I think about the nebulous political cloud surrounding these people and those who may have approached the conclusion but had the strength to carry on. I say nebulous because research is never going to encapsulate the reasons for one to kill oneself. If 50k in the US is the number who followed through, the numbers must be huge. I say this, because the suicide death statistic, is only the start of the problem - it's a scale.
Misery festers at all of us. Labels, drugs and conversation can help, but it's just burying the problem for it to resurface later. Until we start getting political movements towards human needs, this will continue.
That someone not only have decided that death is better, but also have gone through all the steps to act on it is a measure of their resolve, if anything. And as you've said, they're still a rarity. On the spectrum of entertaining occasional thoughts to taking steps to actually doing it, the further you go, the less common it is!
That a lot of people have already gone this far, just how many more are mulling about it, questioning whether or not life is worth it, whether or not to do anything about it? And this "it gets better" mantra keeps some people from even speaking up! Why speak up when you're just going to be slapped with a thought-terminating-cliché? It makes it harder to know how many people are miserable enough to entertain "bad thoughts", and that the only objective measure we'd have is the number of people who've gone to the very end.
Honestly the number of people I've seen who are just living on the thought of "if I didn't wake up tomorrow, that would be fine, except my mom might be sad". And I mean seriously, not just the type of people who upvote posts of r/me_irl
My mom passed away earlier this year, right now I'm at the "maybe I'll win the lotto... oh, time for the benzos" stage. Good thing I don't live in the US and can get my daily dose for free... or is it.
Indeed. A quick check on the available studies on suicidal ideation (worldwide) led me to this study, which I can't vouch for, but still gives me an indication that it's not just our bubbles that's led us to thinking it's prevalent.
To quote its abstract:
Taking these figures at face value, around one out of five people worldwide have thoughts of suicide. Or by cobbling together estimates of world population aged under 25y/o and multiplying by 17% (harmonic mean of 14.3% and 22.6% to two sig figs), that's roughly 550 million people. More than the US population, according to Wolfram Alpha.
Of course, that's just very rough data, but still quite sobering if you ask me.
I'm just confirming here but prevalence implies that these statistics take into account size of the population measured? Like, suicide per capita has gone up?
If I am reading the abstract of the study I linked correctly, yeah. The percentage is of the population size (of youths--which I didn't see a more stringent definition of).
The part I quoted also said, if I am understanding it correctly, that the year (hence, time) is only a factor in studies from the US. I guess you can say that it's saying two different things. The "14.3% to 22.6" figure is for youth worldwide, but not accounted for time (hence, can't say if it's increasing or not). Then the studies from the US indicate that it's rising (for the US).
I recently came to the realization that staying alive to prevent my share of an inheritance from going to the greedy bitch who married my father late-in-life is a reason to stay alive. That's fucking sad as fuck.
Don't get me wrong. I love my life. But when something so dark and grim can be phrased as a positive, things are really wrong.
Spite can be a very effective motivator too, you know, lol! To live in spite of the shitty world around us, I see that as kinda romantic, even heroic.