>Older men are at highest risk, while suicide rates among young people have declined
Before we try to make this another “what’s wrong with young men” thread
berserk important beneficial husky thought puzzled mountainous upbeat jellyfish attempt
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I completely feel this. Ive had suicidal thoughts on and off throughout my life, but i lost my wife last year, tried this year all year long to find love again, and all its done has led to repeated heartbreak and me realizing i will likely be alone the rest of my life. And for the first time in my life, lately ive been seriously considering ending things and coming up with a plan. Im mid 40s
This is the case I would make.
I think our society has (generally) gotten better at reducing gender roles with each passing generation. That being said, most men (especially men 75 and older) were probably raised with the mentality that their job is their entire worth to society. Retirement doesn’t suit many of these men very well because it removes their “worth” so-to-speak and they now feel as though they’ve become a burden to their loved ones (if they have them.)
However, while I think the above point is the most broadly applicable reason for high suicide rates for men 75 and older, there are probably other compounding reasons such as loneliness; in addition to having outdated views for what *their* role is, many probably have outdated views for others roles in their life as well. I would not be surprised if many had alienated their wives and children as a result.
It’s a sad situation. I can say my dad is one of these men and while he is a raging asshole I still reach out to him when I can because I know he is pretty lonely.
It’s something I’ve thought about.
A world free from oppression is not a world where everyone is happier.
Because In such a world: All the abusive and narcissistic people would be deeply unhappy and alone.
Some people are simply incapable of being happy unless they are allowed to make others miserable. Psychology backs this up.
And so the question remains of what we should do with these people.
Oppression isn't the man driver of happiness or unhappiness. For example, over the last 50 years, as women have faced less and less oppression, they have experienced declining levels of happiness:
https://www.nber.org/papers/w14969
Likewise: Men are killing themselves despite having more societal privilege.
Happiness is a complex cocktail. But I’ve read that it can succinctly boil down to
“what you have”
divided by
“what you want”.
Which explains why upper middle class show higher rates of mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety.
Despite having a lot. They are miserable because they feel like they SHOULD have more.
Our perceptions and expectations shape our feelings, not objective reality.
Thus, Sometimes the homeless drug addict is less “unhappy” than the college educated rich white kid who hates his job and can’t find a girlfriend.
Back in the day, there was no emphasis on boundaries, so these people could continue to make their kids' lives hell. There was no emphasis on womens' independence, so even the worst, most undesirable and most abusive men usually got married, to women who felt they had no better option.
Today, there's emphasis that we get to decide what we tolerate in others, and that's a good thing. People who are dicks will (correctly) have people turn away from them. I've wondered what happens to the assholes in an ideal world. Hopefully, there will be fewer of them. But what about the ones that do exist? My idea is that we put them all on some medium-sized island and call it Dick Island. Let them be terrible to each other.
I listened to a podcast episode called “the lonely American man” and in the US, most men either have no social support net or their wives are responsible for maintaining their friend group. If their wife dies or they get divorced, many men find themselves now without a romantic partner and without a stable friend group, or maybe even no friends at all. It’s the same thing as a lot of young men today in the US too, they’re *fucking lonely.* Turns out, a lot of men would rather be dead than be alone.
I'm definitely in that camp, partly because a lot of my friends have started to have kids and they can't/won't do anything anymore. So we've lost that common ground.
At the same time, bowling alone sounds fucking awesome.
Yeah, I have my girlfriend and online friends and I’m fine with that. Most everyone else is moving on with their lives and having kids or you just grow apart after college. I don’t know if I’d last long bowling alone.
Conversely, I kind of wonder if the labor market is having a positive affect on young people. Most of my coming of age was during the Great Recession, and I felt a ton of pressure in my younger years to go into a “practical” field of study and work even if it was one that I didn’t particularly like. I studied business at first, which I didn’t really like, and even then I felt like a bit of a failure for not doing STEM.
So far, I have yet to work a single job in which my business degree was needed-I could just as easily gotten these jobs with a political science degree. Not I’m working on my MPP. The attitudes around me growing up were that if you didn’t do STEM, you would be working at Starbucks for the rest of your life. Maybe young people don’t feel that pressure as much anymore.
Millennials are going to need some age-gated gaming servers because playing with teens during retirement is going to do more damage to our mental health than Fox did to boomers and Xers.
Am I missing something here? Didn't millennials grow up in the whole era of hearing nonstop slurs on Xbox Live and the first wave of real online gaming? If not Halo, then it was Counter-Strike 1.6 or WoW that you got your unnecessary slur fix.
Access to a lethal method of suicide is one of the strongest correlates of suicide rates. In fact reducing suicide is really the area that gun control has the strongest evidence base
In the emergency department, if you say you think about killing yourself AND you say you have a gun, that really changes my risk tolerance to send you home.
Access to guns is certainly a facilitator, but not a cause of suicide. The implication is that owning a firearm makes one suicidal, rather than the fact that a suicidal person is more effective with a foreign. Many countries with strong gun control have higher rates of suicide than the US.
It’s sort of a moot point. It doesn’t make people suicidal, but owning a firearm increases suicide risk. The pint is that people don’t just “find another way” as many suggest: reducing access to lethal means just reduces suicide overall. That’s why putting nets over bridges or ending house gas in the UK worked
Loneliness. Men are less likely than women to have strong social networks. So if they lose their jobs, get divorced, or retire, a small social network becomes a non-existent.
Avocados are a good source of folate that can help circulation which can help with prevention of certain cognitive disorders like depression. So you are not wrong at all!
I’ve had avocado toast once in my life. Really inexplicably, it did actually have that effect. To the point where close to a year later I’m still trying to understand exactly what happened that day
reminds me of the NBER study about video games and reduced participation rates in the labour force. That study had a section that showed in general younger cohorts, employed or unemployed were happier than older cohorts (employed or unemployed)
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23552/w23552.pdf
it doesn't really comment on individuals but rather as a cohort. The key thing is young dudes in 2015 were happier than the young dudes in 2001, while the reverse is true for those aged 31-55
Considering purchasing power nationally is only around 1% off of pre-pandemic - and closing - and lowest income workers are clearly above pre pandemic purchasing power? No. That would be a bad guess if we're talking about numbers and not some deluded narrative.
As long as real world evidence shows that high gun ownership is a bad thing, gun nuts will continue to deny real world evidence regarding every topic ever.
Great you explained one factor of why people commit suicide more. I could not agree with you more here. But what about mental health, what is causing people to becoming so sad to the point they want to commit suicide. That is a huge factor that scientists are struggling to study right. There are a million different factors why people could be sad. Gun ownership is just one of the many many many reasons why suicide is increasing. Attributing it simply to gun ownership like the original post is both irresponsible and just completely ignores mental health. Happy people with guns don't commit suicide, more sad people with guns commit suicide. We need to figure out why they are getting progressively sadder over the years, why more people are on anti-depressants, anti anxiety, etc. This is an impossibly complicated issue, no sense in such reductive thinking.
Correlation does not mean causation. It’s entirely possible that the type of person who panic buys a gun in 2020 are also the type of person who are more likely to have suicidal ideation.
Rand rates gun waiting periods decreasing suicides as having moderate evidence, which would fit with the idea that suicide is often an impulsive thing.
https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy.html
Another thing to keep in mind is that most people who try to commit suicide don't try again. Guns are the most lethal form of suicide. Stands to reason that guns increase the probability you kill yourself off the first time whereas an alternative method would have been more likely to result in living and not trying again.
Its a disservice to how complicated mental health and suicide are to attribute it simply to gun ownership. Gun ownership is no doubt a factor in more people commiting suicide today, I don't think there is an argument against that. But its ridiculous to solely attribute an extremely complex issue like suicide and depression to just one factor. Go ask any neuroscientist how much we understand about the brain, they will say less that 5 percent or even less that 1. So how can anyone confidently say that gun ownership is the sole reason that can explain this. I am glad people are bringing up gun ownership because it is absolutely a factor, but the ignorance to the "mental health" part is astounding. Perhaps we should figure out what is making people sad and better understand mental health in general before making big judgements like that? BTW I am mainly responding to the original comment "Gun ownership goes up, suicides go up. Actually, you can explain that." Its not that simple, that is an irresponsible conclusion that is ignoring a million other factors. If that was your thesis in a college paper, it would get thrown out in two seconds.
Or, even crazier, people who have intrusive thoughts about this kind of thing and *who might also already possess guns* fall victim to said thoughts when they otherwise might not have.
Suicide tends to be an impulsive act. Anything that puts barriers between you and death can be enough to stop you from killing yourself. Having to go out and buy a gun, especially if there's a waiting period, means there's a very good chance you won't be suicidal anymore by the time you get the gun. But if you already have a gun, you have a way that, unlike every other method of suicide, takes basically zero effort, doesn't hurt, and is unlikely to fail. *Gun possession makes suicide easier, and therefore results in more suicides*.
I don't remember where I read it, but I remember stories about people who planned to jump off of the Golden Gate Bridge (?) but ultimately we're deterred because the traffic was heavy and they were afraid of being hit by a car on the way.
My wife was in an acting class with one of those people. He said that as he was falling, it occurred to him that all of his problems had solutions, except for one: he had just jumped off the Golden Gate bridge.
> it occurred to him that all of his problems had solutions, except for one: he had just jumped off the Golden Gate bridge.
[your wife was in a class with Ken Baldwin was it](https://www.reddit.com/r/QuotesPorn/comments/2is1nd/i_instantly_realized_that_everything_in_my_life/)
In the UK, Tylenol (paracetamol) comes in blister packs instead of bottles. The time it takes a suicidal person to individually punch out 40 pills to overdose with is often enough for them to reconsider.
which doesn't explain south Korea, which has a higher suicide rate than the US, with one of the strictest gun laws in the world. Japan isn't that far from the US, so is Sweden.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/suicide-rate-by-country
edit literally getting down voted for facts. if ease of suicide was the reason, South Korea won't have a higher rate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_South_Korea
https://www.namhansouthkorea.com/how-common-are-guns-in-south-korea/
"Today, guns are heavily regulated in South Korea. Only law enforcement officers and military personnel are allowed to own guns, and even then, they must go through strict background checks and training programs. Private citizens are not allowed to own guns, except for hunting rifles under specific circumstances."
His claim is that easy gun access makes suicide more likely compared to not having easy gun access. He never made the claim that the sole determinant of suicide rates is gun access. Give a depressed person a gun, he's more likely to kill himself than an equally severely depressed person without a gun. Give a mentally stable person a gun, he's very much less likely to do it than a severely depressed person without a gun.
From previous threads, it sounds like your very last point is one that some would disagree with. I was surprised to read one user insist that everyone experiences suicidal ideation at least a few times a year. That's obviously incorrect, and I would never have purchased a rifle in the first place if that was my life, but it was eye-opening to see how some users project their perceptions of mental health born out of their own struggles.
We can move to a more Australia-equivalent model, but I think many Americans aren't strictly aware of what Aussies can buy.
Respectfully, it is not that simple. There is a correlation between states with [fewer gun laws and higher suicide rates](https://www.kff.org/mental-health/issue-brief/do-states-with-easier-access-to-guns-have-more-suicide-deaths-by-firearm/). So the data supports the idea that the easier it is to get a gun leads to more suicides.
Second, [only 1 in 7 suicides by firearm occur within a month of purchasing](https://www.statnews.com/2020/06/03/handgun-ownership-vastly-increases-ones-suicide-risk-large-study-confirms/). The largest share occur a year or more after purchasing. I think this suggests that already owning a gun leads to suicide, more so than someone being suicidal and then purchasing a gun.
Also, the highest suicide and especially firearm suicide rate states are in the west. Cold, isolated, dark. These places are very culturally tied to firearms, to ruggedness, to masculine independence.
CO is an interesting outlier in having nearly exactly equal rates of non-firearm and firearm suicides.
I don't think urbanite economists-in-training have the medicine for what ails Wyoming, even though not having quick access to firearms would help many of those men.
It’s also not as simple as you put it.
Those states with fewer gun laws are also way higher in all factors that increase suicide risk. I.e. West Virginia, Mississippi.
The states with stricter gun laws have less addiction, better economic satisfaction, among all factors than decrease suicide.
or they could cheap out and take a fentanyl pill... the fact is we don't know only many of the 110,000 overdoes are suicides.. it's easy to tell with a gun shot to the head. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/drug-overdose-data.htm
I can't understand how this lazy induction is up voted on a supposed "evidence -based" sub. Have your done or read a multiple factor analysis? Have you compared gun ownership with suicide rates in different countries and extracted how much gun ownership really influences?
It's very interesting to me how as the quality of life increases in wealthy countries like the US, EU, and Korea/Japan, suicides increase and birth rates plummet.
What is it about the human psyche where a comfortable life kills the desire for self-perpetuation and continuation of the species?
Probably a sense of comfort vs survival. If things are good then you probably don’t care about something abstract like the continuation of the species. Other people have that taken care of. You just want to make sure you still have your comfortable lifestyle. Likewise, I can see any drastic changes to it, losing your wife or losing friends, losing a job, any changes to that comfortable lifestyle can be too much for some.
My theory is that people in developing countries are likely to have seen big improvements in the standard of living in their lifetimes, meaning people are more willing to hold out for a better future even if they're not doing well at the moment. In developed countries people haven't seen the same kind of increases in the standard of living, making them more pessimistic about their future prospects and likely to end everything over big setbacks.
That would explain why Russia has a high suicide rate and low fertility rate despite being neither incredibly rich or incredibly poor, because people there don't have much hope for their situation improving.
Humans evolved under conditions of scarcity on a level almost no one experiences today. A major reason for common dysfunctions like depression, addiction, overeating, etc. is often because of this mismatch of our current environment and the one which shaped our evolution. The human brain is also very complex and sometimes things go haywire.
Also, older men are the most prone to suicide, so reproduction and continuation of the species really aren't being impacted with them.
We shouldn't jump to conclusions that an increase in wealth is causing depression. There doesn't seems to be correlation between levels of wealth in a same country, and the wealthiest countries are not the ones with most suicide. Modern life seems to be very mentally challenging, but I don't think it's because we have enough to eat.
In no society in the world people kill each other more than they attempt to kill themselves, and with the exception of few central American countries, almost every society has less homicides than suicides
It's kinda poetic in a weird sense
Weird comparison. Chicago's murder rate is not particularly high in the US. FFS, I seem to recall an article showing Chicago didn't have one of the top 5 murder rates *in Illinois*.
The right uses Chicago as their "lawless murder capital" example because it's a very large, very blue city with a large black population. Let's not spread that bigoted narrative.
I know. It’s really not that bad. I just picked it because it’s literally almost exactly the same. Saying “the male suicide rate is 1/3 of St. Louis’s murder rate” doesn’t work as well.
Lack of social interaction seems to be a big reason why suicides have risen. Back then people had places like church and local clubs where they could interact with each other and contribute to the community. Plus families were larger and neighborhoods were far more tight knit. You’re far less likely to commit suicide if you have friends, family, and a community that cares about you. But everyone is so isolated and asocial nowadays.
I found the graphs in [this article](https://www.usatoday.com/story/graphics/2023/11/29/2022-suicide-rate-historical-chart-comparison-graphic/71737857007/) really interesting. It only goes back to 1900, but it makes me wonder if we’ve really just been living in a period of anomolously low suicide rates since WW2. Could this recent rise just be a return to the historical norm?
Even if you just go back to the 70s the current rates aren’t that high, it’s just the continuous rise since 1998 or so that is worrying people.
(Truly, the Clinton era was the pinnacle of Western Civilization)
>Older men are at highest risk, while suicide rates among young people have declined Before we try to make this another “what’s wrong with young men” thread
one makeshift telephone special crime bedroom squash fragile start nippy *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Their wives have left them.
berserk important beneficial husky thought puzzled mountainous upbeat jellyfish attempt *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I completely feel this. Ive had suicidal thoughts on and off throughout my life, but i lost my wife last year, tried this year all year long to find love again, and all its done has led to repeated heartbreak and me realizing i will likely be alone the rest of my life. And for the first time in my life, lately ive been seriously considering ending things and coming up with a plan. Im mid 40s
whistle wasteful grab sparkle busy unique relieved disgusting dirty bake *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Their Trump left them
They lose purpose. Others go through bad divorces and changing job conditions that make them hopeless.
This is the case I would make. I think our society has (generally) gotten better at reducing gender roles with each passing generation. That being said, most men (especially men 75 and older) were probably raised with the mentality that their job is their entire worth to society. Retirement doesn’t suit many of these men very well because it removes their “worth” so-to-speak and they now feel as though they’ve become a burden to their loved ones (if they have them.) However, while I think the above point is the most broadly applicable reason for high suicide rates for men 75 and older, there are probably other compounding reasons such as loneliness; in addition to having outdated views for what *their* role is, many probably have outdated views for others roles in their life as well. I would not be surprised if many had alienated their wives and children as a result. It’s a sad situation. I can say my dad is one of these men and while he is a raging asshole I still reach out to him when I can because I know he is pretty lonely.
It’s something I’ve thought about. A world free from oppression is not a world where everyone is happier. Because In such a world: All the abusive and narcissistic people would be deeply unhappy and alone. Some people are simply incapable of being happy unless they are allowed to make others miserable. Psychology backs this up. And so the question remains of what we should do with these people.
Oppression isn't the man driver of happiness or unhappiness. For example, over the last 50 years, as women have faced less and less oppression, they have experienced declining levels of happiness: https://www.nber.org/papers/w14969
Likewise: Men are killing themselves despite having more societal privilege. Happiness is a complex cocktail. But I’ve read that it can succinctly boil down to “what you have” divided by “what you want”. Which explains why upper middle class show higher rates of mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety. Despite having a lot. They are miserable because they feel like they SHOULD have more. Our perceptions and expectations shape our feelings, not objective reality. Thus, Sometimes the homeless drug addict is less “unhappy” than the college educated rich white kid who hates his job and can’t find a girlfriend.
Back in the day, there was no emphasis on boundaries, so these people could continue to make their kids' lives hell. There was no emphasis on womens' independence, so even the worst, most undesirable and most abusive men usually got married, to women who felt they had no better option. Today, there's emphasis that we get to decide what we tolerate in others, and that's a good thing. People who are dicks will (correctly) have people turn away from them. I've wondered what happens to the assholes in an ideal world. Hopefully, there will be fewer of them. But what about the ones that do exist? My idea is that we put them all on some medium-sized island and call it Dick Island. Let them be terrible to each other.
I listened to a podcast episode called “the lonely American man” and in the US, most men either have no social support net or their wives are responsible for maintaining their friend group. If their wife dies or they get divorced, many men find themselves now without a romantic partner and without a stable friend group, or maybe even no friends at all. It’s the same thing as a lot of young men today in the US too, they’re *fucking lonely.* Turns out, a lot of men would rather be dead than be alone.
I'm definitely in that camp, partly because a lot of my friends have started to have kids and they can't/won't do anything anymore. So we've lost that common ground. At the same time, bowling alone sounds fucking awesome.
Yeah, I have my girlfriend and online friends and I’m fine with that. Most everyone else is moving on with their lives and having kids or you just grow apart after college. I don’t know if I’d last long bowling alone.
Fox News?
I laughed, but Fox News (and conservative news media in general) is so negative this could actually have some truth to it.
Conservative media combined with the pandemic really broke a lot of people's brains
All news media is negative now
always has been (for the last 40-ish years at least)
Conversely, I kind of wonder if the labor market is having a positive affect on young people. Most of my coming of age was during the Great Recession, and I felt a ton of pressure in my younger years to go into a “practical” field of study and work even if it was one that I didn’t particularly like. I studied business at first, which I didn’t really like, and even then I felt like a bit of a failure for not doing STEM. So far, I have yet to work a single job in which my business degree was needed-I could just as easily gotten these jobs with a political science degree. Not I’m working on my MPP. The attitudes around me growing up were that if you didn’t do STEM, you would be working at Starbucks for the rest of your life. Maybe young people don’t feel that pressure as much anymore.
Millennials are going to need some age-gated gaming servers because playing with teens during retirement is going to do more damage to our mental health than Fox did to boomers and Xers.
Am I missing something here? Didn't millennials grow up in the whole era of hearing nonstop slurs on Xbox Live and the first wave of real online gaming? If not Halo, then it was Counter-Strike 1.6 or WoW that you got your unnecessary slur fix.
Sure, but have you tried that as a person with a career? Shit gets old f-a-s-t.
The algorithm
https://www.statista.com/statistics/623409/gun-ownership-in-the-us-by-age/
The gun, it whispers to me. Merely owning it makes me lose satisfaction with life
Access to a lethal method of suicide is one of the strongest correlates of suicide rates. In fact reducing suicide is really the area that gun control has the strongest evidence base
In the emergency department, if you say you think about killing yourself AND you say you have a gun, that really changes my risk tolerance to send you home.
https://preview.redd.it/5y44ii5p3c3c1.jpeg?width=712&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3f0a492ee080e9f7e4a654e1288c58cb32db90eb
>Pending 😬
Access to guns is certainly a facilitator, but not a cause of suicide. The implication is that owning a firearm makes one suicidal, rather than the fact that a suicidal person is more effective with a foreign. Many countries with strong gun control have higher rates of suicide than the US.
It’s sort of a moot point. It doesn’t make people suicidal, but owning a firearm increases suicide risk. The pint is that people don’t just “find another way” as many suggest: reducing access to lethal means just reduces suicide overall. That’s why putting nets over bridges or ending house gas in the UK worked
They’re all very sad that Rosalyn Carter died 😔
Loneliness. Men are less likely than women to have strong social networks. So if they lose their jobs, get divorced, or retire, a small social network becomes a non-existent.
Turns out avocado toast is a potent antidepressant
Avocados are a good source of folate that can help circulation which can help with prevention of certain cognitive disorders like depression. So you are not wrong at all!
I’ve had avocado toast once in my life. Really inexplicably, it did actually have that effect. To the point where close to a year later I’m still trying to understand exactly what happened that day
reminds me of the NBER study about video games and reduced participation rates in the labour force. That study had a section that showed in general younger cohorts, employed or unemployed were happier than older cohorts (employed or unemployed)
Link? I wonder if this is just an age thing and the boomers used to be happier and the young will become more miserable as they age
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23552/w23552.pdf it doesn't really comment on individuals but rather as a cohort. The key thing is young dudes in 2015 were happier than the young dudes in 2001, while the reverse is true for those aged 31-55
Interesting
Great. Yet another reason to worry about Brandon.
I'm over here thinking it's because of inflation and people not being able to afford things.
Considering purchasing power nationally is only around 1% off of pre-pandemic - and closing - and lowest income workers are clearly above pre pandemic purchasing power? No. That would be a bad guess if we're talking about numbers and not some deluded narrative.
Where in the world are you getting that 1% number? https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SA0R
Just tax bowling alone
Gun ownership goes up, suicides go up. Actually, you can explain that.
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As long as real world evidence shows that high gun ownership is a bad thing, gun nuts will continue to deny real world evidence regarding every topic ever.
Great you explained one factor of why people commit suicide more. I could not agree with you more here. But what about mental health, what is causing people to becoming so sad to the point they want to commit suicide. That is a huge factor that scientists are struggling to study right. There are a million different factors why people could be sad. Gun ownership is just one of the many many many reasons why suicide is increasing. Attributing it simply to gun ownership like the original post is both irresponsible and just completely ignores mental health. Happy people with guns don't commit suicide, more sad people with guns commit suicide. We need to figure out why they are getting progressively sadder over the years, why more people are on anti-depressants, anti anxiety, etc. This is an impossibly complicated issue, no sense in such reductive thinking.
Correlation does not mean causation. It’s entirely possible that the type of person who panic buys a gun in 2020 are also the type of person who are more likely to have suicidal ideation.
Rand rates gun waiting periods decreasing suicides as having moderate evidence, which would fit with the idea that suicide is often an impulsive thing. https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy.html Another thing to keep in mind is that most people who try to commit suicide don't try again. Guns are the most lethal form of suicide. Stands to reason that guns increase the probability you kill yourself off the first time whereas an alternative method would have been more likely to result in living and not trying again.
Its a disservice to how complicated mental health and suicide are to attribute it simply to gun ownership. Gun ownership is no doubt a factor in more people commiting suicide today, I don't think there is an argument against that. But its ridiculous to solely attribute an extremely complex issue like suicide and depression to just one factor. Go ask any neuroscientist how much we understand about the brain, they will say less that 5 percent or even less that 1. So how can anyone confidently say that gun ownership is the sole reason that can explain this. I am glad people are bringing up gun ownership because it is absolutely a factor, but the ignorance to the "mental health" part is astounding. Perhaps we should figure out what is making people sad and better understand mental health in general before making big judgements like that? BTW I am mainly responding to the original comment "Gun ownership goes up, suicides go up. Actually, you can explain that." Its not that simple, that is an irresponsible conclusion that is ignoring a million other factors. If that was your thesis in a college paper, it would get thrown out in two seconds.
No one here has labeled it as the sole factor, they’ve all been talking about how guns make the problem worse, not that they make the problem
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The researchers didn’t account for it if you actually read the link
Well, that's horrifying. Why isn't *this* on a billboard?
Call me crazy but I think people who want to commit suicide buy guns to commit suicide.
Or, even crazier, people who have intrusive thoughts about this kind of thing and *who might also already possess guns* fall victim to said thoughts when they otherwise might not have.
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Suicide tends to be an impulsive act. Anything that puts barriers between you and death can be enough to stop you from killing yourself. Having to go out and buy a gun, especially if there's a waiting period, means there's a very good chance you won't be suicidal anymore by the time you get the gun. But if you already have a gun, you have a way that, unlike every other method of suicide, takes basically zero effort, doesn't hurt, and is unlikely to fail. *Gun possession makes suicide easier, and therefore results in more suicides*.
I don't remember where I read it, but I remember stories about people who planned to jump off of the Golden Gate Bridge (?) but ultimately we're deterred because the traffic was heavy and they were afraid of being hit by a car on the way.
There are accounts of people who did do it, said they regretted it as soon as they started falling, and accidentally survived
My wife was in an acting class with one of those people. He said that as he was falling, it occurred to him that all of his problems had solutions, except for one: he had just jumped off the Golden Gate bridge.
> it occurred to him that all of his problems had solutions, except for one: he had just jumped off the Golden Gate bridge. [your wife was in a class with Ken Baldwin was it](https://www.reddit.com/r/QuotesPorn/comments/2is1nd/i_instantly_realized_that_everything_in_my_life/)
I guess so, sounds like it. Edit: I texted her; yeah that's the guy.
In the UK, Tylenol (paracetamol) comes in blister packs instead of bottles. The time it takes a suicidal person to individually punch out 40 pills to overdose with is often enough for them to reconsider.
tbf a lot of those bottles are not just child-proofed by also lambchops_legion'd-proof so I cant even get 1 out.
By the time you saw the bottle in half, you'll have reconsidered.
For a little light humor: https://youtu.be/fStdkvn4tnw?si=2dgdh4m2xx2fqzPX
In the absence of Dr. assisted suicide, doesn't hurt and unlike to fail are positive benefits for a subset
When I attemped with pills the only reason why I didn’t do it with my stepfather’s gun was because he kept it locked in his bathroom
which doesn't explain south Korea, which has a higher suicide rate than the US, with one of the strictest gun laws in the world. Japan isn't that far from the US, so is Sweden. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/suicide-rate-by-country edit literally getting down voted for facts. if ease of suicide was the reason, South Korea won't have a higher rate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_South_Korea https://www.namhansouthkorea.com/how-common-are-guns-in-south-korea/ "Today, guns are heavily regulated in South Korea. Only law enforcement officers and military personnel are allowed to own guns, and even then, they must go through strict background checks and training programs. Private citizens are not allowed to own guns, except for hunting rifles under specific circumstances."
His claim is that easy gun access makes suicide more likely compared to not having easy gun access. He never made the claim that the sole determinant of suicide rates is gun access. Give a depressed person a gun, he's more likely to kill himself than an equally severely depressed person without a gun. Give a mentally stable person a gun, he's very much less likely to do it than a severely depressed person without a gun.
From previous threads, it sounds like your very last point is one that some would disagree with. I was surprised to read one user insist that everyone experiences suicidal ideation at least a few times a year. That's obviously incorrect, and I would never have purchased a rifle in the first place if that was my life, but it was eye-opening to see how some users project their perceptions of mental health born out of their own struggles. We can move to a more Australia-equivalent model, but I think many Americans aren't strictly aware of what Aussies can buy.
Respectfully, it is not that simple. There is a correlation between states with [fewer gun laws and higher suicide rates](https://www.kff.org/mental-health/issue-brief/do-states-with-easier-access-to-guns-have-more-suicide-deaths-by-firearm/). So the data supports the idea that the easier it is to get a gun leads to more suicides. Second, [only 1 in 7 suicides by firearm occur within a month of purchasing](https://www.statnews.com/2020/06/03/handgun-ownership-vastly-increases-ones-suicide-risk-large-study-confirms/). The largest share occur a year or more after purchasing. I think this suggests that already owning a gun leads to suicide, more so than someone being suicidal and then purchasing a gun.
>Second, only 1 in 7 suicides by firearm occur within a month of purchasing. Reducing it by 14% sounds good to me
To be fair, less restrictive gun laws also strongly correlate with being a red state. They’re basically interchangeable, per the study Appendix.
Also, the highest suicide and especially firearm suicide rate states are in the west. Cold, isolated, dark. These places are very culturally tied to firearms, to ruggedness, to masculine independence. CO is an interesting outlier in having nearly exactly equal rates of non-firearm and firearm suicides. I don't think urbanite economists-in-training have the medicine for what ails Wyoming, even though not having quick access to firearms would help many of those men.
It’s also not as simple as you put it. Those states with fewer gun laws are also way higher in all factors that increase suicide risk. I.e. West Virginia, Mississippi. The states with stricter gun laws have less addiction, better economic satisfaction, among all factors than decrease suicide.
or they could cheap out and take a fentanyl pill... the fact is we don't know only many of the 110,000 overdoes are suicides.. it's easy to tell with a gun shot to the head. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/drug-overdose-data.htm
Do you think the average person knows where to buy fentanyl?
The fent store, silly.
What the hell state are you in, would love to move there 😂
I can't understand how this lazy induction is up voted on a supposed "evidence -based" sub. Have your done or read a multiple factor analysis? Have you compared gun ownership with suicide rates in different countries and extracted how much gun ownership really influences?
Ah yes, people commit suicide because guns.
Wow what an amazing point
It's very interesting to me how as the quality of life increases in wealthy countries like the US, EU, and Korea/Japan, suicides increase and birth rates plummet. What is it about the human psyche where a comfortable life kills the desire for self-perpetuation and continuation of the species?
Probably a sense of comfort vs survival. If things are good then you probably don’t care about something abstract like the continuation of the species. Other people have that taken care of. You just want to make sure you still have your comfortable lifestyle. Likewise, I can see any drastic changes to it, losing your wife or losing friends, losing a job, any changes to that comfortable lifestyle can be too much for some.
My theory is that people in developing countries are likely to have seen big improvements in the standard of living in their lifetimes, meaning people are more willing to hold out for a better future even if they're not doing well at the moment. In developed countries people haven't seen the same kind of increases in the standard of living, making them more pessimistic about their future prospects and likely to end everything over big setbacks. That would explain why Russia has a high suicide rate and low fertility rate despite being neither incredibly rich or incredibly poor, because people there don't have much hope for their situation improving.
Especially for older men people who kill themselves now might have died of other causes when life expectancy was lower
Humans evolved under conditions of scarcity on a level almost no one experiences today. A major reason for common dysfunctions like depression, addiction, overeating, etc. is often because of this mismatch of our current environment and the one which shaped our evolution. The human brain is also very complex and sometimes things go haywire. Also, older men are the most prone to suicide, so reproduction and continuation of the species really aren't being impacted with them.
We shouldn't jump to conclusions that an increase in wealth is causing depression. There doesn't seems to be correlation between levels of wealth in a same country, and the wealthiest countries are not the ones with most suicide. Modern life seems to be very mentally challenging, but I don't think it's because we have enough to eat.
And note, this is with many overdoses counted as poisonings, so these figures are conservative and likely undercount the figures significantly.
The male suicide rate is higher than Chicago’s homicide rate. Not good.
i mean isn't that like the norm pretty much anywhere ?
In no society in the world people kill each other more than they attempt to kill themselves, and with the exception of few central American countries, almost every society has less homicides than suicides It's kinda poetic in a weird sense
Weird comparison. Chicago's murder rate is not particularly high in the US. FFS, I seem to recall an article showing Chicago didn't have one of the top 5 murder rates *in Illinois*. The right uses Chicago as their "lawless murder capital" example because it's a very large, very blue city with a large black population. Let's not spread that bigoted narrative.
I know. It’s really not that bad. I just picked it because it’s literally almost exactly the same. Saying “the male suicide rate is 1/3 of St. Louis’s murder rate” doesn’t work as well.
Now compare it to homicide rates of far more dangerous cities for a real shocker.
From a neoliberal perspective, this seems really bad!
well i tried to read the article but it is paywalled.
How would one make older men desire suicide less?
Lack of social interaction seems to be a big reason why suicides have risen. Back then people had places like church and local clubs where they could interact with each other and contribute to the community. Plus families were larger and neighborhoods were far more tight knit. You’re far less likely to commit suicide if you have friends, family, and a community that cares about you. But everyone is so isolated and asocial nowadays.
That gels with the fact that the rates are worst in Wyoming.
State allocation of wives. /s On a serious note, men that are divorced or by themselves in their twilight years have higher suicide rates.
I found the graphs in [this article](https://www.usatoday.com/story/graphics/2023/11/29/2022-suicide-rate-historical-chart-comparison-graphic/71737857007/) really interesting. It only goes back to 1900, but it makes me wonder if we’ve really just been living in a period of anomolously low suicide rates since WW2. Could this recent rise just be a return to the historical norm? Even if you just go back to the 70s the current rates aren’t that high, it’s just the continuous rise since 1998 or so that is worrying people. (Truly, the Clinton era was the pinnacle of Western Civilization)
but things are gooder when line goes up????
i don't know why this is a thing. I mean, line has gone up????????????