US suicides hit an all-time high last year
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.
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Everytime I see suicide statistics like these. I don't think of the deaths. I think of the misery each individual must have experienced in order to come to the conclusion that death was better.
Then I think about the nebulous political cloud surrounding these people and those who may have approached the conclusion but had the strength to carry on. I say nebulous because research is never going to encapsulate the reasons for one to kill oneself. If 50k in the US is the number who followed through, the numbers must be huge. I say this, because the suicide death statistic, is only the start of the problem - it's a scale.
Misery festers at all of us. Labels, drugs and conversation can help, but it's just burying the problem for it to resurface later. Until we start getting political movements towards human needs, this will continue.
I think of the misery each individual must have experienced in order to come to the conclusion that death was better.
That someone not only have decided that death is better, but also have gone through all the steps to act on it is a measure of their resolve, if anything. And as you've said, they're still a rarity. On the spectrum of entertaining occasional thoughts to taking steps to actually doing it, the further you go, the less common it is!
That a lot of people have already gone this far, just how many more are mulling about it, questioning whether or not life is worth it, whether or not to do anything about it? And this "it gets better" mantra keeps some people from even speaking up! Why speak up when you're just going to be slapped with a thought-terminating-cliché? It makes it harder to know how many people are miserable enough to entertain "bad thoughts", and that the only objective measure we'd have is the number of people who've gone to the very end.
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
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.
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.
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?
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).
I recently came to the realization that staying alive to prevent my share of an inheritance from going to the greedy removed who married my father late-in-life is a reason to stay alive. That's fucking sad as fuck.
Don't get me wrong. I love my life. But when something so dark and grim can be phrased as a positive, things are really wrong.
Spite can be a very effective motivator too, you know, lol! To live in spite of the shitty world around us, I see that as kinda romantic, even heroic.
Yes, and it shows how many more actually suffer that much. Since only a minority of people actually follow through with suicide. It's hard to estimate how many (try to) numb their pain with drugs, alcohol, gambling, food or whatever.