
Our World in Data: Suicide - tosh
https://ourworldindata.org/suicide
======
lilboiluvr69
This issue is somewhat close to my heart.

My grandmother committed suicide. My mother has tried to commit suicide on
several occasions, and I have suffered from depression for most of my life.

I'm happy to say that ketamine infusion therapy was a breakthrough for me,
after decades of making no progress with anti-depressants, I am now virtually
depression-free and have been so for years. I highly recommend it to anyone
who suffers from treatment-resistant depression. That said...

> Every suicide is a tragedy.

Statements like that on suicide prevention websites have always bothered me
because I find them disingenuous, and for me personally have always been
counter-productive. I think it's obvious that not all suicides are tragedies.
I think that as uncomfortable as it makes us, for many people suicide is the
most responsible decision a person can make.

Not everybody has loved ones, and not everybody is a great person. My best
friend's father was incredibly abusive and incredibly miserable, despite
spending his whole life in various forms of treatment. His death marked a
significant improvement in my friend's wellness. I suppose this man could have
just left his family but...I wouldn't say his suicide is a tragedy. He's no
longer suffering.

A lot of the arguments I see against suicide is that it hurts the people
around you. Which is true, and this effect is difficult to understate. I'm
still affected by the suicide of my grandmother, whom I never even met.

But that's not a reason to live, that's just a reason not to die.

I'm guessing that access to quality healthcare is one of the best ways to
prevent suicide. (Luckily I could afford my ketamine injections and subsequent
prescriptions.) I think that's obvious to everyone though. Strange in my
country how access is still such an issue...

~~~
automatoney
Maybe the argument that suicide hurts the people around the person who killed
themself can be helpful by reminding people that there's others who care about
them who would want to help if they could. Either way, it seems to be enough
for some people, and I think if it helps people through a crisis then it's an
argument worth repeating.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
Wanting to help and being able to are very different things though.

------
roenxi
It is easy to like ourworldindata.org - breaking the data out by age is most
welcome. Suicide at 80 has a very different meaning than suicide at 18.

A grim thought is that in an ideal world there would be a large number of
deaths by suicide. Many of the people I know who are in favour of euthanasia
have had to watch someone die wasting away from cancer. There are bad ways to
die.

~~~
dr_dshiv
Suicide and euthanasia should be treated as separate causes of death

~~~
csunbird
In a philosophical point, aren't all suicides are euthanasia?

People suicide because they are suffering and they do not see any other way
out to end the suffering.

Edit: I know that there are problems that can be fixed and problems that can
not, but in their perspective, nothing works.

~~~
DoreenMichele
I've spent a lot of time suicidal. I'm happy to see this discussion
recognizing that people are suicidal because they are suffering.

But suicide is often a rash decision because you are currently miserable and
if you knew that you wouldn't be miserable tomorrow morning, you probably
wouldn't do it. In contrast, euthansia is a more logically sound decision that
"This is not going to get better and I'm not interested in enduring where it
goes from here."

I know there's a difference because I've been through experiences where I was
physically miserable but clear-headed and rational and realized this was a
short-term thing that would soon resolve, but was physically miserable enough
that if I had not been absolutely certain it would resolve within a matter of
hours, I would have been suicidal. I have also been mentally screwed up at
times and lacked that kind of clear thinking.

It's hard to effectively articulate the difference, but when I'm not rational,
I can tell my adult sons and let them know it's not safe to leave me alone
today. (It's been a while since I've had such an incident. Being back in
housing has been good for both my general level of suffering and my mental
stability.)

~~~
csunbird
Thank you for sharing this.

I think that, you were clear headed - and that was the difference. My personal
experience/anecdote with suicide (not me, but I was involved in the recovery),
the person were not able to think clearly, even if their problems were fixable
and _they knew_ that the problems were _fixable_ but required too much effort,
just wanted it to end.

~~~
DoreenMichele
I have attempted suicide once and been hospitalized on a suicide watch twice.
My adult sons, now in their thirties, are abundantly familiar with the medical
and other issues that fuel my suicidal tendencies and were raised with
excellent rubrics for how to handle it.

Some things I've said before that bear repeating:

If you know someone who is suicidal, help them deal with their actual problems
instead of dismissing their suicidal tendencies as "they just have a mental
health issue." Suicidal ideation is often rooted in serious, intractable
personal problems. Acting like they are merely crazy actively pushes people
over the edge. (It's basically a form of gaslighting.)

There are generally two elements to any mental health issue, like suicidal
ideation or depression. One is physical and the other is social or
situational.

When you have reason to believe someone is under physical duress, you may be
able to mitigate their current crisis by feeding them, making sure they are
adequately warm or cool, making sure they are hydrated and helping them get
some sleep. If you tend to their physical needs, they may wake up tomorrow
feeling more stable.

If someone is clearly irrational, do not argue with them about whatever they
are saying. Do not engage with their crazy talk. It only puts out the fire
with gasoline. There is no good reply to something like that because agreeing
helps push them over the edge and disagreeing will typically not convince them
of anything but will help make them feel disrespected, unheard and like no one
cares.

Instead, try to help them find distraction or otherwise engage in care-taking.
Resist the temptation to focus on the lurid detail that they are suicidal and
talking about negative things.

Don't try to shut them down. If they want to talk, let them talk, just don't
reply to it in a way that adds fuel to the fire. It shouldn't be forbidden for
them to talk about feeling suicidal.

If you have no idea how to reply, it's okay to say that. It's generally vastly
better to say something like "I feel out of my depth here and I don't know
what a good response is." than to ignore it or pretend you do know what you
are doing.

~~~
csunbird
Agreed. I have a background of depression too, so I was able to sympathize
with the person but not on that level. Most of my help was just being there
for them and taking care of them, and the idea of somebody is there for them
was clearly helping.

We got medical help for the recovery, not in the drugs way, but a professional
with the experience of dealing with the kind of problems the person had.

Our job was to keep them going with their lives. That was it. Feeling of being
cared and loved allowed them to get professional help that they would not seek
otherwise.

------
teleforce
I'm surprised that nobody pointed out that the country with the largest number
of muslim/islam population Indonesia consistently has the least number of
percentage for suicide rate. This is quite telling from a stark contrast
between the suicide percentage rate of East and West Papua New Guinea even
though they belong to the same physical island.

At the other extreme, the country with the least religious affiliation such as
South Korea and Japan are consistently on the higher end of the suicide
percentage rate.

In most of religions and especially Islam the suicide is a taboo subject, and
it's believed that anyone who committed suicide will go straight to hell. This
belief probably explains some aspects of the suicide distribution as it is.

~~~
trianglem
My hypothesis is that religion satisfies (albeit with lies) some basic human
needs that leads to a more content life. They don’t say religion is the opium
of the masses for no reason.

~~~
googthrowaway42
This is kind of a weird perspective. They're "lies" but they satisfy a basic
human need that preserves life?

~~~
trianglem
That’s what faith is in the context of religion. Faith is how completely you
believe the lies. Hypothetically the more complete the delusion, the more
content you will be.

To end with another platitude, ignorance is bliss.

------
DanBC
There are a lot of problems with this webpage.

(EDIT: I am a bit wrong here, and I'm grateful to mthoms below for pointing it
out!)

It doesn't tell you how each country defines a death by suicide. It doesn't
tell you if that definition has changed over time. It doesn't tell you whether
they tried, nor how they've tried, to correct for different definitions of
suicide. It talks about age-standardised rates, but doesn't tell you how they
standardised for age. And then it puts it all together in very authoritative
graphs and charts and invites the audience to draw conclusions and create a
narrative and over-interpet the data.

"This country has a high suicide rate because of school pressure"; "that
country has a high rate because there are lots of lonely young men", "this
country has huge problems with alcohol dependency so of course their rate is
higher". These may be true, but we can't tell from OurWorldInData.

I urge you to be cautious when reading this data, especially if you're
comparing one country to another.

~~~
mthoms
The page does address the issues you speak of [0]. Having said that, I do
agree that the disclaimer is critically important and should probably be
placed at the beginning rather than the end of the document.

[0] [https://ourworldindata.org/suicide#data-
quality](https://ourworldindata.org/suicide#data-quality)

------
automatoney
Just wanted to highlight this piece from the article:

"Depression and other mood disorders are widely recognized among the most
important risk factors for suicide... [Bertolote and Fleischmann (2002)]
report that 98% of those who died by suicide had a diagnosable mental
disorder."

You can dispute the number to some extent, but thinking of suicide as a choice
made in sound mind is a misrepresentation of the reality of suicide.

~~~
guerrilla
This misses the possibbility of common cause in some or many cases. Also,
mental illness can cause immense suffering and choosing to escape that can be
entirely rational depending on the circumstances especially considering
acccess to health care. The reaction to mental illness socially and
economically should also be considered because it can make life even worse for
sufferers. If escaping a life of gauranteed pain is irrational then we're
going to have to disagree on our conception of rationality here.

~~~
automatoney
The problem is that mental illness affects your ability to think. Most of the
time, someone contemplating suicide is not making a rational choice about
their future - mental illness often impairs the ability to make well thought
out decisions. So sure, someone could hypothetically make the rational choice
for euthanasia, but that isn't what is going on most of the time people are
suicidal. I don't know what I believe about euthanasia, but I am in no way
comfortable with okaying people to independently make that decision without a
second opinion.

------
musicale
Too many students die from suicide each year, and I suspect the situation is
greatly exacerbated by the intense stress of academia, combined with extremely
high expectations from others and society in general (which says that if you
don't get into school X or complete degree Y then you have failed and have no
future) and an all-or-nothing reward model (actual learning being a distant
second to the credential/stamp of approval of getting into school X or
completing degree Y.)

Graduate school can be particularly stressful; in addition to having to
complete intense and often very isolated work, students are often completely
dependent on their graduate advisors for funding as well as degree progress -
but switching advisors is much harder than changing an industry job since it
usually requires starting an entirely new research project from the beginning.

~~~
gautamcgoel
Yup. Switched advisors about a year ago. I'm much happier with my research
situation, but switching wasn't easy. I was lucky, I was able to transition my
research program over pretty smoothly.

------
A4ET8a8uTh0
It is interesting given that it seems in a lot of ways, overall trends did not
change much since Carlin did hit special on suicides ( men do it more often
than women, US leads with guns suicides ) suggesting it is something stable
within the human population. Maybe it is a built-in way for basic population
control.

But suicides are interesting topic to me all in the themselves.

Personally, I have no problem with suicide since I see it as a personal choice
( as in my body, my right to die ). It seems most people object based on how
it affects them. Very selfish.

~~~
devmunchies
our population is only able to balloon to the current numbers because we are
basically hacking nature with our technology.

before modern tech people death was rampant.

I don't see how a suicidal population control could have developed,
evolutionary.

------
lettergram
My sound strange, but I’m encouraged by these numbers.

Personally, I think it’s super unfortunate people choose to commit suicide,
but it’s a choice.

Everything else (besides addictions) on the mortality chart for the US is not
a choice... think about that for a moment, we have reduced all the other risks
of death so much that suicides are a meaningful number. In fact, suicides are
now above homicides, which are also dropping.

~~~
bluntfang
I'm not sure if all survivors would identify with suicide being a choice. I'm
willing to be corrected, but I feel like a lot of people who attempt suicide
feel like they have expended all of their choices. I'm also not sure if
addiction is a choice either, maybe you could expand on your thoughts?

------
dr_dshiv
I've been looking for any updates on covid19 and suicide. This lancet article
is from April.

Gunnell, D., Appleby, L., Arensman, E., Hawton, K., John, A., Kapur, N., ... &
Chan, L. F. (2020). Suicide risk and prevention during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Lancet Psychiatry, 7(6), 468-471.

~~~
fdschoeneman
I am curious too. These data are critical to policymakers today. Without
knowing what excess deaths from suicide and overdose look like stratified by
age, they can't understand the risk and reward of covid-19 lockdowns. And even
if they suspect as I do that the number of life years lost to suicide and
overdose caused by lockdowns bmay outweigh the number 'saved' by lockdowns, it
will be difficult to persuade anyone of this without data.

Not forcing HHS and CDC to prioritize collection of these statistics was a
serious mistake.

------
grungydan
I really wish there were better resources out there than a hotline that
results in you being thrown in a locked down "padded" room in a hospital where
nobody has any business taking care of or treating mental health patients.

This is speaking of the U.S. obviously, for anyone that doesn't know that this
is the outcome for way, way too many people trying to get help.

I'm currently on contract at a TINY hospital in the middle of freaking
NOWHERE. We had a nine year old boy locked in an empty room for WEEKS. Weeks.
Shuffled him around some, then he'd come back for a few more WEEKS.

Health care in this country is absolutely fucking garbage, and mental health
care is the slime that gathers in the bottom of the landfill.

------
JoeAltmaier
Encouraged! Suicide, even ignoring heart disease and cancer, is down around
#13 as cause of death worldwide. Homicide even lower.

------
vmchale
Interesting to see the distribution of psychiatric diagnoses; people don't
often think of mental illness aside depression in this context.

Schizophrenia is less common than depression so less absolute burden, but it's
deadlier.

------
musicale
The economic aspects (presumably related to people losing their job, income,
housing, health care, etc.) are interesting and significant, but the
recommended interventions don't seem to address them.

------
killswitched
Still here trying to finish for years now

It hasn't worked yet

I still fear death

And don't see that changing

Which is a conundrum especially now, being a middle aged burned out white male
American college drop out homeless with a ruined reputation

I just want to be left alone not asking help

I gave my small fortune away about seven figures

I live in a vehicle and dream of being dead day in and day out

Wanted out for a long long time

I'm certainly not alone in this feeling but most rational folks will at least
take care of themselves and not entirely sabotage their future

Too many unresolved incidents

Bullies in life: childhood, university, adulthood, workplace

No faith in the species

No desire to be alive

I'll probably be gone from suicide at some point before retirement

I think the species is shit

And this naturally is in total conflict with the will of most people

Just want to be left alone so I can finish the job already

Far too many unresolved incidents

Tech makes life worse in many ways by the way

For example I can't escape my ruined reputation one google search away

That will outlive me by a long shot

------
fulafel
The focus on suicide methods feels of questionable utility, surely the suicide
motivations are where it's at.

~~~
DanBC
Suicide prevention focuses on a package of measures. These include kinder
fairer societies as a long term measure. I don't know anyone working in
suicide prevention in England who isn't deeply aware of the wider determinants
of mental ill health. (And I know a lot of people working in suicide
prevention).

But the package of measures also includes "preventing access to means and
methods". This is because we know it makes a difference. We have some natural
experiments to show this: changing the domestic supply of gas from coal gas to
natural gas caused a substantial decline in deaths:
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC478945/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC478945/)

Changing cars to have catalytic convertors also caused a decline in deaths.

People get caught up on this. They say "merely making it harder to buy
paracetamol isn't addressing the root causes, you need to do that". They're
right, but they're missing the point that this is supposed to be a package of
measures that also looks at why people attempt suicide.

~~~
stallmanite
Isn’t it cruelty on top of cruelty to not address how unkind and unfair our
society is and then attempt to block people’s only escape route? If the world
isn’t going to become less cruel who are we to prevent individuals from
escaping it?

------
nightchalk16
There needs to be more attention/regard (I'm not sure which word is correct)
for the contexts of suicide. A book that addresses this is The sealed box of
suicide. The contexts of self-death by Simon Tatz and Colin Tatz.

[https://www.amazon.com/Sealed-Box-Suicide-Contexts-Self-
Deat...](https://www.amazon.com/Sealed-Box-Suicide-Contexts-Self-
Death/dp/3030281582/)

------
curo
Any ideas on why income inequality has a __negative __correlation with suicide
mortality?

[https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/suicide-rate-vs-income-
in...](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/suicide-rate-vs-income-
inequality?minPopulationFilter=1000000)

EDIT: responding to the spurious & not a good fit comments, the correlation in
2015 (the first year with good data) is -0.41 (n=64)

~~~
Johnjonjoan
Stoicism would be my guess. Remember emotions are relative - having something
bad happen won't necessarily cause as large an emotional response if you are
used to bad things happening to you.

~~~
curo
that makes sense, the higher the fall; the harder the impact. Related to this,
I think the social nets in poorer countries are stronger so the fall isn't as
rough.

All that said, this is inequality not income.

~~~
Johnjonjoan
>All that said, this is inequality not income.

Inequality is unfair. The more unfairness someone has to put up with the less
sensitive they will be to other stressors and perceived unfairness.

This obviously isn't as simple as I'm making out. Individual people will have
different stressors. However when we talk large scale I think this simplistic
view can be warranted.

------
jeffbee
Suicide data for the US is incredibly depressing. Suicide among kids aged
12-14 has doubled in the 20 years to 2018 and now outranks any kind of disease
as the 2nd leading cause of death (after accidental injury). You probably
don't think there are lots of 10-year-old schoolgirls hanging themselves, and
that used to be incredibly rare, but now there are several of those every
year. It's a dark time.

------
joshspankit
Has anyone noticed that besides outliers, the first map looks like a map of
UVB levels?

Vitamin D is huge in lifting moods.

I know it’s reductionist, but what if suicide rates could drop worldwide with
just everyone getting a proper dose of Vitamin D?

------
totony
The suicide rate ratio of genders is interesting. Most countries have a >2
ratio of males to females suicide rates, except countries slightly passed the
developing country status. Some countries have 6-7, while similar have way
less. Any idea why?

------
zxkc
Some of these charts could really benefit in readability from a log transform
on one or both axes. For example, the male vs female suicide rate chart.

------
graposaymaname
I can't shout this loud enough! This is important!

More power to ourworldindata.org and everyone working on the research.

------
crystaln
Any data yet on how covid has affected suicide rates?

------
hn_throwaway_99
The thing I take away from comparaison of suicide rates between countries is,
to put it bluntly, some cultures suck. Or, more specifically, some cultures
are pretty awful for the people actually living in them.

South Korea has a strong economy, is conquering the entertainment world, and
is a place of technological marvels. They also have 5% of deaths by suicide,
compared to Greece with 0.5%, whose economy collapsed a decade ago. Not to
mention SK has the lowest birthrates in the world.

I feel strongly we need policy makers to move away from GDP growth as the
primary marker of national health.

~~~
andrewseanryan
When looking at the numbers, you may want to take consideration the cultural
acceptability of suicide. There are cultures where suicide is not viewed the
same way, and therefore it may be elevated. Certain philosophies view it as an
acceptable decision if someone has suffered greatly and doesn’t wish to
anymore (off the top of my head, some stoic philosophers have spoken about
it). I haven’t done my research on the topic, but isn’t it somewhat acceptable
to kill yourself in Japan in certain circumstances? The taboo factor in other
countries likely drives the numbers down as many people won’t entertain the
idea because it is “bad”.

The point is, I’m not sure “some cultures suck” is the only part of the
equation. We also need to consider how that culture educated their society
about suicide.

~~~
beiller
To add data to this, Japan was similar to South Korea in 1996 (both around 2%)
but by 2017 South Korea's share of deaths from suicide is 5.08% vs. Japan's
2.1% and USA's 1.71%. From my understanding, culturally Japan and South Korea
are similar, please someone correct me if I am wrong.

------
mlthoughts2018
I’m disappointed to see that this website only gives you two options, “read
the privacy policy” and “agree.” It does not list out each use of cookies and
data collection and allow individually opting out of each use case, which is
what most sites do and what I believe GDPR requires a business to support.

If the only way to make the large banner go away is to click “I agree” then
you are actively harming your users and at the very least should be ashamed of
yourself.

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Kednicma
Firearm owners are primarily a danger to themselves, followed by those close
to them. Our long-standing epidemic of firearm-induced suicide could be
tempered by better gun regulation.

~~~
logicchains
From the graphs there it doesn't seem like there's a correlation between
national gun ownership and suicide rates.

~~~
chmod775
[https://ourworldindata.org/suicide#gun-
prevalence](https://ourworldindata.org/suicide#gun-prevalence)

~~~
logicchains
That's within America, not a comparison of national rates. In spite of America
having a much higher gun ownership rate than other countries it doesn't appear
to have a particularly high suicide rate.

~~~
Kednicma
Go compare the USA and its suicide, gun ownership, and veteran rates, as a
composite metric, with Switzerland and Israel, which I'm choosing because
they're rich democracies with mandatory military service and relatively high
rates of gun ownership; one is very reserved, one is more aggressive than the
USA, and neither has the endemic problem of military veterans using service-
issued firearms to commit suicide.

I found [0] to be a decent introduction to the problem; one needs to take a
birds-eye view in order to see it.

[0] [https://everytownresearch.org/report/those-who-serve-
address...](https://everytownresearch.org/report/those-who-serve-addressing-
firearm-suicide-among-military-veterans/)

~~~
watwut
The big difference is that American veterans are more likely to be people
deployed into combat zone for extensive length of time. Also, being American
soldier affects your family situation quite a lot - they have much higher
rates of divorces then general population.

The mandatory military service in Switzerland is not comparable to being
American soldier.

