Hell is other people.
See here how access to guns not only makes suicide by gun more likely, but suicide more likely, period:
No, I understand and believe that. I’m sure it was partially responsible for the increase of suicides noted in my earlier link.
Any theory about why there was a drop in American suicides should account for a lack of serious decline in other countries during the pandemic. The two obvious factors, istm, that make America different in this area are gun ownership and high overdose numbers.
Even more obvious to me are the lack in the US of safety nets softening the effects of eviction and unemployment. Last year both of those nets were beefed up in the US closer to levels already in place in much of the developed world.
More obvious than orders of magnitude bigger gun ownership and overdose deaths? You’re entitled to your opinion, of course. Do you have any measures on just how much the effects of unemployment and evictions were softened?
Total unemployment benefits paid U.S. 2023 | Statista.
All of the federal, state, and, municipal eviction moratoriums enacted in 2020 are too numerous to number.
I meant how many people were kept from going homeless or below the poverty line due to those laws compared to 2019. But don’t worry about it if the conversation is annoying you.
Just posting that in case you thought the eviction moratorium actually stopped any evictions from happening at all in America last year.
The eviction moratorium covers 20 million households in the US. Your article is talking about tens of thousands falling through the cracks.
There was about 870k evictions in 2015 - that’s about 72k/month. If there were tens of thousands of evictions between Sept and Dec, that’s still a significant number. “covers 20M households” doesn’t really tell much of a story.
How many of them committed suicide because of homelessness?
You tell me. I’m not the one arguing that the eviction moratorium caused the drop in suicides.
Neither am I. But you’re the one casting doubt on someone else’s assertion that the eviction moratorium might have contributed to the drop in suicides. What evidence do you have to show that it didn’t?
Is that how it works? They don’t have to back up their assertion?
This isn’t GD, so Fudd isn’t under an obligation to back up his hunch. But if he isn’t then I am most certainly not obligated to chase down the relationship between eviction and suicide plus dig up how many fewer evictions actually happened in 2020 compared to 2019 to prove him wrong.
I’ll add, I wouldn’t be surprised if the suicide rate really went down*, I am only skeptical of this very significant drop happening at the same time overdoses skyrocket and peer countries did not see similar drops.
- it dropped 2% the year before, I think? That was considered meaningful.
Yes, that’s one of the reasons I’ve see proposed in the UK. What people were saying was that the trains weren’t running, so people couldn’t jump under them, and you couldn’t enter tall buildings, so you couldn’t throw yourself off them.
Both of those methods are more difficult, but actually the commonest methods of suicide in the UK are hanging and poisoning (ie overdoses). Those can be done at home. But I’ve known people who’ve committed suicide that way, and they did it when their loved ones were out of the house. Not everyone lives with other people, of course, but lots of people do.
Hanging is by far the most “popular” method. Even the ones in the woods are more difficult during lockdown because everyone and their school-age child has been going for walks due to lack of anything else to do.
But I think it’s partly that, if you were already suicidal before the pandemic, that would mean you were miserable, and thought the world is shit, and/or you felt isolated from the world… the pandemic didn’t, necessarily, make that feeling any worse. If anything, it made you feel normal.
Now is probably the time to watch out for potential suicides. Suicides always increase in the spring; this year could be bad.
Yet we have a 6% drop in suicides coupled with an increase in first time gun owners. In a lot of surges in gun sales you have the guy with a dozen firearms getting that thirteenth he’s always had his eye on. If that guy buys another weapon I doubt that that would increase his suicide chances significantly, he’s already got the tools, but a first time gun owners suicide chances normally go up at least some.
But in 2020 because of the corona virus and civil unrest there were five million first time gun buyers. The article notes that 58% of these were African American men and women.
So here’s a piece of contradictory information; a surge in first time gun owners and a drop in suicide rates. Maybe absent the surge suicide rates would have declined by 8% or 10%. Anyway, a piece of confounding information.
I think the drop may be because everyone else was miserable. It’s hard to be sad when everyone else is happy, that’s why suicides go up around Christmas. Just knowing that life sucks for everyone else as well gives people a “We’re all in this shithole together” vibe.
And, in fact, the suicide rate may not have gone down for PoC. Cite:
I have to say I find this rather confusing, because Switzerland doesn’t match. Link.
Last year, the number of suicides rose, many believing that the lockdown was a direct contributing factor to this. Worryingly teenagers and young adults represented the highest rise in suicides, leading the government to put in place a think-tank to see how they can help this segment of the population deal with any further measures.
This information must be wrong because I’ve been assured by numerous Dopers that the pandemic wouldn’t cause a national mental health crisis. Everybody knows that people are capable of staying home for the health and safety of themselves and their families without any effects on their mental status.