I’m trying to find out which causes more deaths, schizophrenia or clinic depression (i.e., major depressive disorder, not psychotic depression).
So, what is the mortality rate for people with schizophrenia? What is the mortality rate for people with clinical depression? Of the mortalities, what proportion are suicides?
No cite available, but I’ve been told that schizophrenics have a suicide rate as high as 10%. (And that’s those who succeed, not just attempt.) They just can’t stand their condition and/or the side effects of their medication.
They also tend to have shortened life expectency since they’re not able (or willing) to take care of their health & diet like normies do.
We also are subject to violence from normies at a pretty appalling rate, which is no doubt a factor. Losing our housing as a consequence of being institutionalized and then discharged w/o housing as part of a discharge plan probably plays a role, too.
To the OP: I know my first response was kind of flip, but in all serousness, your question as (I assume) intended would be damn difficult to operationalize. No one “dies from schizophrenia”. You may attribute this deliberate suicide and that delusional leap-from-96th-floor to schizophrenia — anecdotal tales and news stories you’ve read — but how the heck would you get a data set that could really answer your question?
In fact, operationalizing “schizophrenia” as the indepedent variable is fraught with its own problems: does the opinion of one doctor constitute sufficient reason to classify a person as a schizzy or a depressive? How about the folks who have at various times been dx’ed as one and then later the other? Unlike, say, hypercholesterolemia or congestive heart failure, the diagnostic criteria are notoriously fuzzy.
I am bipolar as well and bipolar people have the benefit of almost completely effective treatments for many that follow through with it. Other mental disorders don’t have such complete hope. Still, untreated bipolar patients have appalling rates of substance abuse and suicide as well.
Is the OP asking for the proportion of people with these illnesses who commit suicide, or for the number of suicides for each illness? I believe that depression is a more common illness than schizophrenia, so it would be possible for there to be more total suicides among depressives even if the proportion of suicides among schizophrenics were higher.