
Daylight Saving Time Increases Suicide Rate - nreece
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/119419743/abstract
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tokenadult
What one has here appears to be a "natural experiment," in that the
researchers looked at when daylight saving time began as a policy in
Australia. (It is already known to suicide researchers that seasonal variation
in daylight length is a strong risk factor for suicide, resulting in seasonal
variation in suicide rates.) The way to check this conclusion would be to look
at other countries (or states in the United States) where policies on daylight
saving time have changed over the years. This is not an ideally controlled
experiment,

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

but suicide data are gathered by a standard World Health Organization
methodology all over the world,

<http://www.who.int/topics/suicide/en/>

and when other national policies change in a country, or differ between
countries, it can be useful to look at whether or not those policy differences
make a difference in suicide rates. Sleep regulation is well known to be an
effective treatment for mood disorders, so this is a plausible correlation to
look at to see if there may be a causal relationship between the policy and
the medical outcome.

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tedshroyer
It seems like you could look just in the United States and compare Arizona
with a state that has similar demographics. Arizona doesn't have daylight
saving time.

~~~
hga
Yeah, and parts of Indiana as I recall as well.

But the numbers may be too small, and the populations too unrepresentative,
for this approach to be very useful.

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pilif
While I can understand that shifting around the clock two times per year is
annoying from an IT perspective, I for one really, really, really love the
longer daylight in the evenings. Being able to walk home in daylight in the
evenings, being able to be outside one hour longer in summer - all of it is
such a nice thing to have.

If we were to stop shifting, I could live with that, if (and only if) we are
constantly staying at DST and not at standard time.

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Gotperl
Correlation != Causation

~~~
imurray
Not sure why the parent was downvoted. It's a perfectly reasonable criticism
of the editorialized title of the submission. The actual article uses
"associated with an increase" rather than "increases".

~~~
tpz
The editorialized title of the submission may have its problems, but
"Correlation != Causation" and equivalent statements need to be consistently
downvoted because they, as on every other site where they have for a while now
been equally if not even more overused, have become the lazy man's catch-all
content-free retort.

Much of what we take as certain once started with observed correlation. This
trend of immediately and automatically discounting observed correlations will
likely do more harm than good over time, as one would be hard-pressed to
hypothesize and later prove (or at least fail to disprove, in the scientific
sense) causation if one's habit were to always blurt "correlation !=
causation" in the face of new information.

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kilian
I certainly felt crappier waking up this morning ;)

