This. Sylvia Plath used this method, btw. In the Netherlands it was pretty much the same. With the out-phasing of barbiturates being a next big step.
Admittedly, it did drop in England and Wales per Bo’s next post. But I’m looking at a graph of the US and seeing a similar drop in the US between 1995 and 2016. What was the US’s ‘suicide method replacement’ during that time? If you look at the UK as a whole, you see exactly the same thing, with a peak in the '60’s, a drop until '97, then a steady rise back to numbers similar to the peak by 2017 (for men at least…women are still lower than the peak).
In the US, the peak for women was in 1970 (7.4) and a drop (4.3 by 1995) then a steady climb back up (6.2 in 2018). For men, it was 1990 peak (21.5), a drop (2001 17.7) then a steady climb back to 2018 (22.8). Leaving out that the last two years have had large increases, this shows pre-Covid numbers…and, at least to me, shows that you get a drop for whatever reason, then a steady climb. While you might get lower numbers in the end, I think you’d need to look at why suicides peaked then dropped, and my ‘fallacy’ is probably that there were other factors besides the suicide method or, I should say, along with suicide method, that caused the shift.
Admittedly, this isn’t something I know a ton about from a psychological perspective. I can look at graphs and charts, but the underlying causes of suicide aren’t something I know about. My WAG is that it has a lot to do with demographics, poverty, and opportunity or perceived opportunity, but I don’t really know.
I have read that societies have preferred methods and methods that are abhorrent to them wrt suicide based on their collective perceptions and mores. I know those can and do shift over time. So, a sudden shift away from an acceptable method could cause a short-term lowering of suicide. At a guess, improving economics and opportunity increases in suicide prevention programs, and outreach programs also can have a big impact (as can the opposite). You’d need to correlate all of this in to account for it before you could underscore method replacement as the main reason…IMHO anyway.
I think you are confusing my point with the idea that there are not other things that affect suicide rate.
Sorry about that…I was reading your post, switching back to Bo’s link, and thinking about some other stuff. Just disregard my stream of consciousness posting. 
If you don’t mind I won’t disregard your post because you put up some interesting questions. AFAIK (and that’s with over 10 years of experience as a psychiatrist), yes there are cultural differences WRT methods of suicide. There are also differences between men and women, which explains (at least in part) the fact that men make fewer attempts at suicide but succeed at a much higher rate. Preferred method for women is taking an overdose of whatever medication, which can lead to hospital admission but isn’t deadly that often. For men, depending on the country, suicide by hanging and firearms.
The drop in suicide rates after coal gas became obsolete is I think a question of low hanging fruit, i.e. denying access to an easy and rather painless method of suicide leads to fewer deaths by suicide. The most deadly and previously used medications for suicides (barbiturates) have become significantly harder to come by in the last few decades and are certainly no longer prescribed routinely. That has had a significant effect on the deadliness of medication attempts.
What these measures reduce most is impulse attempts that end in death as opposed to injury or illness. Impulse attempts still occur, but when it takes more effort to actually kill yourself and especially when it takes more time, there’s also an increasing chance of you changing your mind or not following through.
In my experience it’s harder to stop someone who has made up their minds and are not acting on impulse. Especially because they tend to try again if their first attempt fails.
As for cultural differences; Indian or Surinamese Hindu women are more likely to use poison or cleaning products (like chlorine bleach or sodium hydroxyde) than are caucasian females. I think that’s the most salient example I’ve encountered at least. One other surprisingly damaging method I’ve encountered was ingesting denture cleaner.
Sorry for the hijack. I hope this answers some of your questions.
Thanks, it does help answer some questions I have had. One thing I’ve noticed just looking at the graph of deaths per 100k over time is there seems to be a pattern of almost cyclical rise and fall. It looks like things rise to a peak, then falls off fairly sharply, then starts a steady rise again.
At any rate, thanks for your response.
Can you provide a cite for this ? I think this is utterly made up.
Do you mean White females ? Because Indians are also Caucasian : " 19th century classifications of the peoples of India were initially uncertain if the Dravidians and the Sinahalese were Caucasoid or a separate Dravida race, but by and in the 20th century, anthropologists predominantly declared Dravidians to be Caucasoid"
Yes I meant White. English isn’t my native language, so thanks for pointing that out.
I don’t have a cite, I have my personal experience as a psychiatry resident, combined with those of my on-call colleagues. I’ve worked in acute psychiatry in The Hague and did my residency there. As you might know The Hague has a large Hindostan Surinamese population. I have the same kind of anecdotal evidence from the UK regarding women of South Asian descent. I can imagine this is an urban legend of some sort, but I did notice for myself as well. I remember once reading an article on this, with stats, but that was specifically about weed killer and rat poison ingestion IIRC. I’d have to look it up though. The reason the story remained is not out of racism, at least as far as I can tell, but as part of risk assessment. Same as with knowing that classic antipsychotics cause more, and more serious, side effects in non-Whites.
If I’ve inadvertedly offended you I apologise.
Yes, AFAICT it’s pretty well established that suicide attempts by both men and women in India are more likely to use more lethal means, such as hanging or pesticide ingestion, than the medication-overdose attempts disproportionately committed by European women.
From the first article quoted by you :
Compared to suicides in high-income countries, suicide in India is more prevalent in women (particularly young women), is much more likely to involve ingestion of pesticides, is more closely associated with poverty, and is less closely associated with mental illness.
Bolding mine.
My understanding is, that means, that it has nothing to do with their ethnicity. People from Sri Lanka, Bangladesh or Indonesia with similar poverty levels will have similar suicide incidents. Also - poorer European countries like Ukraine or Moldova may have similar results. AKA - it correlates with poverty - not country of origin.
As a person of Indian origin, I have worked with people with many nationalities / colors and have personally observed many traits / stereotypes. However, I am deeply aware of the phenomenon of “Confirmation Bias”. So unless I see double blind or equivalent results, I see no value in expressing opinions.
As someone who works in acute psychiatry, I am sure you will see the value of double blind test applied to your observation above. Without such a test or published data, I wouldn’t place much value on this opinion.
Thank you for the detailed post. Like I said, I am from India, and India has a huge cross section of rich / poor.
If a scientific conclusion needs to be reached about suicide practices among the women in India, then the sample size needs to be larger and more diverse with respect to income and other things.
Similar sampling should happen with Europeans too - and include poorer European countries like Moldova, Cosovo, Albania, Bosnia …
If you can then statistically show these two populations to have a significant difference wrt suicide methods, I’d be happy to accept the results. Until then, color me skeptic.
It has to do with country and culture rather than ethnicity per se, but it seems clear to me that that’s what Drsunflower1 meant.
I agree it would have been clearer if Drsunflower1 had explicitly drawn that distinction between “Indian/Southeast Asian” and “European/western” women, rather than between “Indian or Surinamese Hindu” and “caucasian” or “white” women.
If the people who want to discuss ways of reducing gun violence could learn not to get gaslighted with cars/stepladders/pools/booze or any other thing that is not a gun, that would be great.
An interesting poll:
That article isn’t very good. They talk more about anecdotes that the actual poll. Because what does “'stricter gun control” mean?
Here is a better article, with results broken down by what voters want:
A small majority want Sales of “assault weapons” banned.
Voters are against banning handguns.
Massive support for more background checks (which I have pushed for).
It also shows that about 42% own a gun- yet still support for mild gun control is popular. If 92% want more background checks , and 42% own guns, it stands to reason that a high % of gun owners want some sort of gun control.
From the perspective of a gun owner I want more regulation but I don’t trust the gun control crowd enough to give them an inch of what they want.
If everyone thought that universal background checks and licensing would shut them up forevermore, we would have it. But there is this deep and abiding belief that as soon as they passed the law, the gun control crowd would keep pushing and would never stop until they outlawed all firearms. So we draw the line in the sand. They would continue to paint anyone that didn’t want to take the next step down the slippery slope as condoning child murderers.
ISTM kind of pathological for lots of people to refuse to take a step that they genuinely think would improve a terrible situation because they believe that other people might then argue in favor of taking further steps that they think wouldn’t improve it.
The gun-rights movement and the gun industry, AFAICT, have been working very hard to inculcate exactly this kind of “learned helplessness” passivity and blame-shifting in gun owners: “We CAN’T take any common-sense gun control measures because if we do we’ll be MADE to take more extreme measures as well, so there’s NOTHING that can be done to ameliorate the situation and THAT’S ALL YOUR OWN FAULT.” Yeah, not convinced.
I don’t know that all these people think that licensing and registration would improve things all that much. It is also possible (and some people think probable) that acceding to the demands of gun control activists would result in even more harm. That is one of the primary points of controversy in the gun control debate, gun control is not necessarily an unmitigated good but gun control advocates seem to think it is. It might be more of a tradeoff than gun control advocates are willing to admit.
I think we would both agree that the 4th amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure; and the 5th amendment protections against self incrimination are important and should be preserved even if some criminals commits a heinous crime after being found not guilty because of a a defective search warrant or an improper delivery of miranda rights. I’ve weighed the pros and cons and know where I stand.
Similarly, people have differing views on the pros and cons of gun rights. I think the general view among many gun owners is that gun control will primarily affect people who are inclined to obey those laws and only affect criminals indirectly.
We recently passed the first federal gun control law in a long time and IIRC there wasn’t nearly as much “but what about assault weapons” chirping as there was in previous failed attempts and the law passed with bipartisan support. There is now but at this point it seems like they are just trying to soothe the less informed gun control advocates that think an assault weapons ban is going to have any serious impact on gun violence. This is the better way to do it. Get legislation passed using good information and data and then after the prospect of any further legislation is out of the question, trumpet assault weapons bans like it would eradicate gun violence, bring peace on earth and grant us all eternal life. Then when another opportunity to smart gun control presents itself, stfu about assault weapons bans and get smart gun control passed then go back to feeding the idiots when the possibility of further legislation is passed.
This is why the ignorance of so many gun control advocates matters. Whenever I hear someone complain about assault weapons I am almost immediately convinced they are lying (or taking a political position that they know is stupid in order to feed into ignorance) or stupid (or they are ignorant about the actual impact of assault weapons on gun violence). I am much more open to discussions about gun control with people who actually know what they are talking about rather than people who are convinced that they know enough about gun violence just by reading an article by a gun control advocate.
I do think it’s fair to jump on the gun industry and lobby for their part in screaming “the sky is falling” even when it’s quite clearly not falling. But its also fair to point some fingers at the gun control proponents who pushed for laws they knew wouldn’t do anything to lower the rate of gun related deaths.
Both are good points. But many industries do that- Pharma has TV ads showing people living ideal lives after getting that new drug. SUV companies, like Jeep show their vehicles going into the great outdoors, when they are really used for commuting and shopping most of the time- same as truck companies that show their trucks pulling huge loads. (Yes, I know a few people do have a second car for commute, etc, and only use their jeep or truck for rock climbing or towing boats, but not many)
I have no issue with a ban on sales of “assault weapons”- but it will not and can not do anything significant. My only worry is that a ban will be passed, but mass shootings will continue, and people will demand more.