Nic Steves asks a question. I have had this comment in the previous post as well
Chris Gale has some words (and video) about Medical Suicide—i.e., doctors ending their own lives. I’m curious what the odds ratios are compared to their own socio-economic cohort. My guess, even more stark.
Some data: this is from an old paper looking at occupations and suicide. Doctors had the tenth highest rating.
Over time the rate of suicide in the professional class has decreased, but in the labouring class it has increased.
During the earlier time period, the highest suicide rates were among veterinarians (77 per 100 000 worker-years), followed by merchant seafarers (76), hotel porters (74), pharmacists (46), hospital porters (37) and dentists (36). During the more recent time period 2001–2005, coal miners had the highest suicide rate (81 per 100 000 worker-years), followed by other manual occupations: merchant seafarers (68), labourers in building trades (59) and window cleaners (46).
…
Of 55 ‘high-risk’ occupations with suicide rates of >20 per 100 000 in either of the two study time periods, there were significant reductions (p<0.05) over
time in suicide rates for 14 of these 55 occupations: electronic engineers (95%), hotel porters (89%), radiographers (87%), chemical plant workers (80%), veterinarians (74%),judges, barristers and solicitors(72%), pharmacists (71%), hairdressers and barbers (67%), doctors (63%), dentists (59%), photographers and cameramen (59%), authors, writers and journalists (56%), machine tool operators (42%) and farmers (38%). Conversely, there were significant increases over time in suicide rates for five of the 55
occupations (Table 1): coal miners (224%), labourers in building trades (200%), plasterers (117%), fork-lift drivers (71%) and carpenters (34%).
The rates in men are much greater than women. And professional sportspeople may be at risk.
There is, however, an inverse curve in the UK. This is from the Br J Psychiatry.
I cannot find data on profession and death rate in the NZ official statistics. However, they do remind me of one thing: where you live and what ethnicity you are matters as much. IN NZ, it helps if you are not Maori and not male
And, again from NZ statistics, it matters if you are not Korean, Japanese, or from Eastern EUrope. .
What good is the world if you have lost your soul? Hearing about the work ethic and schooling of koreans and japanese perhaps it is not that surprising to see such a large suicide rate. When so much of what decides your worth is invested in academics, career, then any failure is seen as a blow to the self. Perhaps they already sacrificed their health, minds, bodies and even souls in the pursuit of things. Suicide is perhaps just the formal tie-ing the knot so to speak. There must be a balance, enough work and discipline so there is civilization, but enough laxity to actually enjoy it. Otherwise what’s the point?
Korea and Suicide. Rough topic on its own.
There seems to be a high correlation to either Lonely jobs (working on a ship clearly is a high suicide risk) or around a lot of infectious diseases w/ high mortality stress. (Putting down animals seems to come with its own cost.)
Though the updated numbers also point to a pretty clear correlation: don’t be homosexual. Which brings us back to infectious diseases and immunology, interestingly enough. (Men in beauty & Women in Sports are generally expected to be homosexual.)
This brings up a world more questions than answers. Can you legitimately “catch” suicide? Plenty of infectious agents cause psychotic effects in humans. (Lord knows there’s enough in animals that do, especially some of those nasty fungi.) But I’d never even considered the idea.
Though we run into the HIV/AIDs and Chicken/Egg issues with Homosexuals when we open this up. If an infectious agent can cause a specific drop the neurological systems that limits self-harm, when combined with other neurological depressants, could be what allows the Interior Logic of Suicide to play out.
This would explain the Suicide Ideation with anti-depressants as well. Depression is actually neuro-protective, as self-limiting effect the body can produce within itself prevents one from doing too much. I would tend to classify Depression as a less-problematic form of Shock, both natural defensive systems that can easily spiral out of control and become their own problem. (Inflammation actually being the one that’s most problematic.)
Let’s game this out a bit, as I’m just rolling with my thoughts.
We know there are specific groups, by many subcategorizations, that are far more likely to commit suicide. (We should probably also take into account Attempt vs Succeed)
– Pre-existing mental issues
– High-stress work environments
– Homosexual/Gender Dysmorphic
– Drug Abusers
– Certain racial groups at vastly higher rates than others in the same region
– History of Suicide in the family
I’m noticing the WHO 2012 report has apparently changed a lot of the assumptions/lists (which are different from the last time I looked at this data). Considering most of the countries now in the top 10 don’t have great government statistics, I’ll kindly skip over those until some time in the future.
http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/articles/role-cortisol-and-depression-exploring-new-opportunities-treatments
Cortisol Axis.
Would also explain the rapid rise in suicide among the Inuit populations in the Northern Hemisphere with the introduction of grain-based food stuffs at a mass scale. (Much higher cortisol & insulin responses from the body in a carbohydrate-based diet than a fat-based diet; totality matters as well.)
Add in the self-selection criteria of people that can been vaccinated, so they survived childhood illnesses that would have otherwise killed them, and I think I’m developing framework here.
I would count Suicide as one of the Cycle Down mental loops, much in the way many other negative actions build upon themselves. Since self-preservation instincts are extremely deep, the way around those instincts requires that the body and mind be in a place to go through the entire Cycle of Logic and not have its natural circuit breakers kick in. General Mental Health needs to be compromised enough to allow for the Cycle to play out, along with all of the reinforcement steps, but not so much that all sense is lost, which should actually break the Logic Cycle. (LSD gets you killed because you think you can fly, for instance. Plus, we can probably assume why Cannabis use is self-selected.)
[There’s also going to be a vitamin D issue involved here, but that’s normally true in any general health concern.]
So you need a situation, at the epidemiology-level, where people are regularly in bad but not terrible shape, with issues revolved around an HPA Axis hormone and genetic + environmental factors playing a role. Sounds just like any inflammatory disorder. And I think we’ve gotten within range.
There’s a dark joke that I mostly just blamed Cup Noodles for the massive difference between Northern Asian & Mediterranean suicide rates. But that’s also not completely inaccurate.
Korea, for instance, has an extremely high suicide rate among the aged 70+, most especially those in poverty. You add lifetime lived in much worse conditions than now (so much, much less food, and a different form), with high stress throughout. Add in a northern climate and social/cultural issues, and a clearer picture starts to make sense. The body’s defense against the Suicide Cycle has been worn down, so once the idea is planted it’s likely to be taken to completion.
This also brings up the likely possibility that the Suicide Cycle itself is actually the pain people trapped in it, rather than some other external or internal issue. Considering the epic amounts of energy that would be needed to keep the mind circling that hard, and the already “depressed” state the mind/body axis would need to be in for an anti-well being Cycle to begin, the stress response system should be screaming at the person.
Has anyone else tried an anti-suicide campaign with “we can take the pain away”?
For anyone that survives a suicide attempt, this would point that the treatment approach is to remove as much inflammation as possible, as the nervous system (and likely GI tract too) has been wrecked. Low carb, medium protein, high healthy fat diet should help. Ketones are neuroprotective on their own. C8 MCT Oil might also help, especially as it has a direct anxiolytic effect.
If we assume, for our discussion here, a Human is unlikely to pursue something that isn’t at least of some short-term benefit, then there has to be a reason the Suicide Cycle can get started.
In a culture where the baseline probabilities are shifted higher for suicide, any extended social network will bring up the idea of suicide at least once over the course of the year. So the concept of Suicide as a “mind virus” is going to be present, so origination need not be Internal. (Though, it could be.)
If you shift the mind into a dysfunctional state with specific weaknesses, the Suicide Cycle should, at the beginning, cause some burst of energy at the beginning. Think of it like a cup of coffee after a rough night. You need something to get moving, and the shot of stimulus gets you started. In this framework, the Suicide Cycle starting point is a burst of stimulus to the nervous system. As the impulse is taboo, degenerative and destructive, it will play of the same combination of brain regions as most criminal activity, however it’s a captive idea. Once the Cycle starts, it becomes its own self-reinforcing narrative, looking a lot like the Gollum/Smeagol “internal” dialogue from Lord of the Rings.
This brings up the possibility that part of the downshift in suicide rates in much of the modern world from the 90s to now is due to the change in illegal drug usage.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/suicidesintheunitedkingdom/2015-02-19
If you go to Figure 2, there’s a change in Suicide rate of the 45-59 age bracket in 2007. Those would be the start of people born in 1962 entering those statistics. They were 18 or so in 1980, which would be the start of the Ecstasy craze in the UK. Considering the UK has about 63 million people and we’re talking about a 7 in 100,000 shift in that age bracket over several years, that’s only around 4,400 people per year committing suicide extra. (So maybe around 130,000 extra suicides because of time-limited factors in the UK, if we extrapolate that 4,400 difference over the 30 years of “prime” suicide age in the UK.)
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