Experts caution that suicide is complicated, and that recent increases might be driven by higher rates of depression or limited availability of mental health services

About 49,500 people took their own lives last year in the U.S., the highest number ever, according to new government data posted Thursday.

  • morrowind@lemmy.mlEnglish
    27·
    11 months ago

    Honestly the number of people I’ve seen who are just living on the thought of “if I didn’t wake up tomorrow, that would be fine, except my mom might be sad”. And I mean seriously, not just the type of people who upvote posts of r/me_irl

    • jarfil@lemmy.worldEnglish
      61·
      11 months ago

      My mom passed away earlier this year, right now I’m at the “maybe I’ll win the lotto… oh, time for the benzos” stage. Good thing I don’t live in the US and can get my daily dose for free… or is it.

    • megane-kun@lemm.ee
      English
      3·
      11 months ago

      Indeed. A quick check on the available studies on suicidal ideation (worldwide) led me to this study, which I can’t vouch for, but still gives me an indication that it’s not just our bubbles that’s led us to thinking it’s prevalent.

      To quote its abstract:

      The prevalence of SI (suicidal ideation) ranged across regions from 14.3% to 22.6%; the prevalence of SA (suicide attempts) ranged from 4.6% to 15.8%. Year was not associated with increasing STB (suicidal thoughts and behaviors) prevalence except for studies from the United States, which showed increasing rates of SI and SA since 2007.

      Taking these figures at face value, around one out of five people worldwide have thoughts of suicide. Or by cobbling together estimates of world population aged under 25y/o and multiplying by 17% (harmonic mean of 14.3% and 22.6% to two sig figs), that’s roughly 550 million people. More than the US population, according to Wolfram Alpha.

      Of course, that’s just very rough data, but still quite sobering if you ask me.

      • heyoni@lemm.eeEnglish
        4·
        11 months ago

        I’m just confirming here but prevalence implies that these statistics take into account size of the population measured? Like, suicide per capita has gone up?

        • megane-kun@lemm.ee
          English
          3·
          11 months ago

          If I am reading the abstract of the study I linked correctly, yeah. The percentage is of the population size (of youths–which I didn’t see a more stringent definition of).

          The part I quoted also said, if I am understanding it correctly, that the year (hence, time) is only a factor in studies from the US. I guess you can say that it’s saying two different things. The “14.3% to 22.6” figure is for youth worldwide, but not accounted for time (hence, can’t say if it’s increasing or not). Then the studies from the US indicate that it’s rising (for the US).