
Suicide rates climbing, especially in rural America - EndXA
https://news.osu.edu/suicide-rates-climbing-especially-in-rural-america/
======
honkycat
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/)

~~~
TuringNYC
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.

~~~
torstenvl
There are a large number of assumptions to unpack in your question. Most key,
I think, is the mapping between progressive proposals and helping people when
they're down.

If I'm a rural American farmer or miner, how does it help me to require me to
buy health insurance or pay a fine? How does it help me to tax me so that the
future white collar and management classes of the American populace can owe
less in student debt?

The problem isn't just that the rural poor don't act in their own best
interests. It's also that the coastal rich are extremely presumptuous about
what other people's interests are.

~~~
conception
Well..

First - when you buy that Heath insurance, if you're poor or poorish, it's
heavily subsidized. Of course, it might have been free but a number of red
States didn't expand Medicare. But yes, it may cost you money because
Oabamacare was step 1 and was always planned to be tweaked but well... We've
seen how political discourse has gone. But medical bankruptcies have fallen
tremendously with Obamacare. That's why you have to pay because it'll save you
if you're unlucky. Just like social security.

Re:free college - why do you think rural areas couldn't benefit from free
college? Less, more expensive education isn't going to help. And the people
that need to pay for it are the ones destroying your neighborhoods and city
centers (aka the Walton family and their ilk)

The lack of investment in their people and empathy for their people of Midwest
governments is what's killing them, not costal elitism. The green new deal is
a perfect example of the sort of investment it needs. But they'll fight it
because winning is all that matters, people's lives be damned.

~~~
wutbrodo
Do you not have a model of people who disagree with you that includes sincere
belief that the policies don't work? Policy is more complicated than wishing
for something and having it work out exactly the way you want: people voting
against the ACA or free college may think it'll legitimately hurt the economy.

FWIW, I'm a pretty strong supporter of the ACA (relative to the
counterfactual, though single-payer would be nice..), and I'm neutral to warm
about free universal college (much of the problem with the way college fits
into our economy is that it's used as a blunt employment filter instead of
actually increasing human capital, and universalizing subsidies may just
exacerbate the problem. OTOH, blowing up that filter and making college the
new high school may be useful in and of itself).

Neither of those opinions prevents me from understanding that people may have
different models of what the effects of these policies are likely to be. You
may argue that it requires a degree of economic illiteracy to believe that,
but 1) the majority of supporters for every policy are grossly economically
illiterate, 2) there's a core of sound economically-literate arguments for
almost every policy, and 3) economic illiteracy is a vastly different charge
from "you're in a cult that prefers winning to improving your and others' lot
in society".

I suspect that it would be pretty easy for someone to take the confident,
unnuanced opinions you likely have on a host of similar issues and make a
similar or at least symmetric charge about your motivations.

------
rrggrr
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
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
> 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.

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NTDF9
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.

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

------
Merrill
Contextual Factors Associated With County-Level Suicide Rates in the United
States, 1999 to 2016

[https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2749451)

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lota-putty
Are there any effective solutions that work to counter suicides?

------
Cyder
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
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.

