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Mental Health Experts Seek To Block the Paths To Suicide
HughPickens.com writes: Experts and laymen have long assumed that people who died by suicide will ultimately do it even if temporarily deterred. Now Celia Watson Seupel reports at the NY Times that a growing body of evidence challenges this view, with many experts calling for a reconsideration of suicide-prevention strategies to stress "means restriction." Instead of treating individual risk, means restriction entails modifying the environment by removing the means by which people usually die by suicide. The world cannot be made suicide-proof, of course. But, these researchers argue, if the walkway over a bridge is fenced off, a struggling college freshman cannot throw herself over the side. If parents leave guns in a locked safe, a teenage son cannot shoot himself if he suddenly decides life is hopeless.
Reducing the availability of highly lethal and commonly used suicide methods has been associated with declines in suicide rates of as much as 30%–50% in other countries (PDF). According to Cathy Barber, people trying to die by suicide tend to choose not the most effective method, but the one most at hand. Some methods have a case fatality rate as low as 1 or 2 percent," says Barber. "With a gun, it's closer to 85 or 90 percent. So it makes a difference what you're reaching for in these low-planned or unplanned suicide attempts." Ken Baldwin, who jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge in 1985 and lived, told reporters that he knew as soon as he had jumped that he had made a terrible mistake. "From the instant I saw my hand leave the railing, I knew I wanted to live. I was terrified out of my skull." Baldwin was lucky to survive the 220 foot plunge into frigid waters. Ms. Barber tells another story: On a friend's very first day as an emergency room physician, a patient was wheeled in, a young man who had shot himself in a suicide attempt. "He was begging the doctors to save him," she says. But they could not.
Reducing the availability of highly lethal and commonly used suicide methods has been associated with declines in suicide rates of as much as 30%–50% in other countries (PDF). According to Cathy Barber, people trying to die by suicide tend to choose not the most effective method, but the one most at hand. Some methods have a case fatality rate as low as 1 or 2 percent," says Barber. "With a gun, it's closer to 85 or 90 percent. So it makes a difference what you're reaching for in these low-planned or unplanned suicide attempts." Ken Baldwin, who jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge in 1985 and lived, told reporters that he knew as soon as he had jumped that he had made a terrible mistake. "From the instant I saw my hand leave the railing, I knew I wanted to live. I was terrified out of my skull." Baldwin was lucky to survive the 220 foot plunge into frigid waters. Ms. Barber tells another story: On a friend's very first day as an emergency room physician, a patient was wheeled in, a young man who had shot himself in a suicide attempt. "He was begging the doctors to save him," she says. But they could not.
If parents leave guns in a locked safe, a teenage son cannot shoot himself if he suddenly decides life is hopeless.
People have been proudly campaigning for irresponsible gun ownership in the US for a very, very, long time. Suggesting things like locking up guns - even in the gun owner's home - will be quickly shot down by people claiming you are impeding on their constitutional right to overthrow the government.
I really, really, wish I was exaggerating or kidding on this one.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Since we've made remarkably limited advances in the treatment of patients who think that the world is worth escaping; we've decided to just start blocking the exits. On the plus side, we have some emotionally salient anecdotes, of the sort that will probably cheer you right up unless you are one of those pesky people we can't really treat!
"Soul skill", or "Souls kill"?
The parsing is important here.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Suicide is all very tragic and it'd be lovely if no-one had to feel that way, but did we really need to throw in the anecdotes at the end?
Ken Baldwin, who jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge in 1985 and lived, told reporters that he knew as soon as he had jumped that he had made a terrible mistake. "From the instant I saw my hand leave the railing, I knew I wanted to live. I was terrified out of my skull." Baldwin was lucky to survive the 220 foot plunge into frigid waters. Ms. Barber tells another story: On a friend's very first day as an emergency room physician, a patient was wheeled in, a young man who had shot himself in a suicide attempt. "He was begging the doctors to save him," she says. But they could not.
How many people beg the doctors to let them die after a failed attempt?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
This feels pertinent to me because this morning I was woken up at 6:45am by a loud helicopter hovering overhead for over an hour. A teenager had jumped in front of the CalTrain by where I live in Palo Alto in an apparent suicide. Turns out this is the 8th such CalTrain suicide so far this year, up from 8 suicides total (10 deaths) over the whole year last year. Locals are loudly requesting for the crossroads to be made into underpasses, and for improved fences etc.
On the one hand I keep thinking that if someone is determined to commit suicide, they'll find a way. (There was a police guard posted at the crossing after previous suicides to prevent this, but the teenager simply jumped the fence 200 yards from the crossing and jumped in front of the train there instead.)
On the other hand, I see the wisdom in trying to make the world a place where it's in no convenient way to commit suicide. As Banksy tweeted this morning, "Suicide does not end the chances of life getting worse, suicide eliminates the possibility of it ever getting better."
You're not in their shoes; let them go.
Suicide is a symptom of mental illness. Taking away the possibility to commit suicide doesn't solve the underlying cause.
As someone who suffers from medical depression I feel pretty strongly about this subject, at least as strongly as I can allow myself to feel.
It may sound paradoxical but having the option to commit suicide was one of the things that helped me to finally seek treatment. Before I approached counseling I decided on method and location for a possible suicide. Had that option not been available to me I might not have been able to push through.
Had there been a policy in place to put people with depression on a 24/7 watch-list to prevent suicide the I would have probably gone for the suicide option first.
When the subject of suicide comes up I often see people claiming that suicide is the "easy" way out. What they don't seem to realize is that more importantly it is a way out.
Some people support assisted suicide for non-treatable painful diseases. Typically autoimmune disorders or certain forms of cancer where the body attacks itself. They have seen how much victims of those diseases have to suffer.
It is much harder to see how much you suffer when the mind attacks itself. People think that therapy cures those problems. It doesn't. Bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and depression are permanent. You can only learn how to endure it or acquire the discipline to keep it back.
To me the depression is much like one would expect from alcoholism. I function, but I can not allow myself to think freely. I have to keep my mind busy in complex projects and not let it wander off. Some relatives seem to have a hard time understanding that I will never want to talk nostalgia with them, ever.
Preventing suicide kind of lacks relevance since the person my mind was before died with the depression anyway.
Taking away to option of suicide doesn't solve anything of that. It only removes the inconvenience of having to deal with a body.
Suicide is a cultural problem, not one of availability (or unavailability) of certain means. The suicide rate of, say, the US and Germany is pretty much the same, despite guns being much more accessible in the former than the latter. However, the train network is much more developed in the latter.
People should, however, be educated about really shitty ways of killing yourself, like overdosing on acetaminophen and the like.
Trying to address the issue of suicide by taking away the means of killing yourself is probably entirely the wrong way to go about it. People who are serious about suicide will always find a way, for starters, and unless something substantial is done to address the mental suffering that drives a person to suicide, all you achieve is to prolong the suffering. It is the kind of boneheaded, incompetent idiocy that you get from politicians, when their only goal is to get re-elected.
I think a much better approach would be
1) Give people the right to suicide and the help to do so safely, if that is the right word. This will show people who are suicidal, that you respect them, something is all too often not the case. I think respect is crucial, because if you see suicide as the only way out, you don't want to seek help if you fear that this way out will be taken away; so you have to know that you can go ahead, if you really want to.
2) Make that right dependent on them having been through good quality advice and assessment. Many people only want kill themselves because they can see no other way - they can often be helped to find a better way out.
There is still too much religiously motivated prudishness towards death - life does not belong to some 'God', it belongs to the individual and it is ultimately the responsibility of the individual what they want to do. It is IMO deeply unethical to force life on somebody who really doesn't want it.
I understand the motivation, but there are simply far too many ways to die if you want to. Even if we nerf the whole world and baby proof everything, we won't stop an adult or teen that wants to die from doing so. But we will make the world a worse place to live.
There is a significant chance that we will just force people to choose a horrific way to die or (perhaps worse) a way that is as likely to leave them in a horrific but not dead state as it is to kill them.
Besides, how will we cook without knives?
Becoming a non-functional remnant of a biological machine? That's not funny. I prefer to function oen way or another while possible.
Yes, life sucks.
Saying that, there might be valid reasons for a suicide when there is no way out. E.g. a criminal is finally cornered by police and faces a life in jail. Or is hunted by some rogue military that will torture and kill him. Or finds out that is terminally ill, or with a neurodegenerative disease (ALS, Alzheimer etc.). It is better to end your life than live through that - sometimes also to make it easier for others around you.
it seems to me that making treatment free (it's expensive!) and encouraging people to get help rather than shaming them for feeling badly would be a better way to go.
society doesn't want spend money to help the mentally ill which ironically bites them in the ass because about 1/3 of the homeless have a form of (untreated) mental illnesses which is why they are homeless. it costs more to have social programs for the homeless than it does to actually help them or even give them homes! i'm sure it would cost much less if we had free treatment to prevent them from becoming homeless in the first place.
wake up, society!
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I can only imagine the costs of changing every last bridge, high area, train track, city sidewalk, etc. into hampster style fenced off tunnels to be, at a minimum, in the hundreds of billions of US dollars (world costs in the tens of trillions) while leaving hundreds of millions of homes in the US alone still chock full of methods to commit suicide anyway. Not to mention natural areas - are we going to fence off every cliff within a few miles of a homestead too?
Here's a thought that's way out there; let's spend those billions on research and development of new medication and treatments instead - that would likely have a far bigger impact. Sadly it's just poorly thought through emotional click bait instead of a sane approach to solving a serious problem. It's as if the rationality of humans is as well evolved as our lower spines.
Some people commit suicide because their life sucks so much they don't want to deal with it any more. People should be afforded the dignity to make their own choices without pseudo-altruistic nannying.
Others do so because they are defective. Selfish, attention-seeking losers who want everyone around them to be part of their pity party. Screw them. The gene pool is improved by their departure.
Oh, by the way, I have personally witnessed a suicide. A roommate blew his brains out in our living room because his "pain management" doctors couldn't manage his pain (neurological disease). I regretted his situation, but I respected his choice. I wished him godspeed as he gurgled his last auto-reflexive breaths.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
once all avenues for taking one's own life are removed, yet no help is given to correct the underlying issues that drive a person to want to end their life, where will these people turn?
I suspect you will see a drastic uptick in the number of homicides as people who cannot flee start lashing out at the world they feel is wronging them.
Nobody ever seems to want to solve the problems they have. That's hard. It's easier to solve problems you wish you had.
I locked up my gun today so little Jimmy couldn't blow his brains out. He'll be fine now.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
To be living on the streets unemployed or temporarily and precarious severely underpaid jobs that wont ever allow yourself to buy a decent home much less a cheap car or some other type of basic means of dignity in the modern industrialized less jobs for the common man and only "hich tech" slavery and tax evasion by our mighty corrupt corp and rented politician A to Z.
Fuck "you".
"You" are lucky "they" just commit suicide and don't take any of these sociopathic parasites that want to rule the world and economy with outdated capitalist and governance models with them as a last act of justice sacrificing oneself in the process.
that those concerned about other's ending their life are projecting their own fear of dying. Who owns one's life? Some priest, politician or shrink or the one living it?
An amazing statistic in the USA is that females have significantly more suicide attempts, while males have significantly more "successful" suicides. And that's due to the availability of guns, which provide an easy way to kill yourself with a high success rate.
An anecdote from the Golden Gate Bridge: A man was spotted on the bridge in some rather agitated state, so the police was called, and the got him. It turned out he had decided to kill himself by jumping off the left side of the Golden Gate Bridge. (Un)fortunately he found himself on the right side. Now there is absolutely no difference between jumping from the left or the right side, but he had decided to kill himself by jumping from the left side. (Un)fortunately there were six lanes of traffic between the right and the left side, and he didn't dare running across the traffic for fear of getting killed, which was actually quite reasonable.
A few years ago, when there was a statistically small number of suicides at Foxconn, the company put up suicide nets which would catch and save people jumping from the roof, and more likely prevent them from jumping in the first place (because these people wanted to die, not look like idiots caught in a net). That gave a course a lot of ammunition to the idiots among the Foxconn haters and Apple haters, but it actually worked. Take a simple way of killing yourself away, and suicide rates drop.
It's long known that the majority of suicides are not done for any rational reason, but because of some mental disturbance. The slightest obstacle in the way of killing themselves can save them.
If I had been able to obtain a gun a number of years ago when I hit rock bottom, I would no longer be here. I'm still not certain if that's a net positive yet (or even how to define such), but I can tell you that I'm deeply glad for all the great experiences I've had in the time since. I expect this approach will help some people. People like me.
that those concerned about others ending their life are projecting their own fear of dying.
Who owns one's life? The one living it or some politician, priest or shrink mindfucking about it and continuing trying to dominate others?
They can no more remove the means for suicide than they can legislate a person's desire to live or what makes them horny.
It's a complete waste of time and money to even attempt to banning the items a person could use to suicide.
It's time for the fucking politicians to actually rectify a serious problem instead of dicking around with time wasting subjects and endless re-iterations of old laws to appear that they're actually working.
"People who are serious about suicide will always find a way"
No You don't. At some point in my teenage life I came to that dark place. But since the easy method was removed from my reach, I did not go for other method. the moment *passed*. In fact suicide is not always associated with a mental illness. I see many poster here pretend that, but it is not. Suicide is a symptom that somebody feels is in a situation where living further is more painful than dying. It CAN be a symptom of mental illness but also simply a symptom of intense physical pain or a symptom of plain stupid teenage angst. And for the last group, removing the easy means can simply make the person force to have more time to think.And thus prevent suicide. And then post about it on slashdot 25 years later.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
"The world cannot be made suicide-proof, of course. But, these researchers argue, if the walkway over a bridge is fenced off, a struggling college freshman cannot throw herself over the side. "
So in short they ARE trying to suicide- proof the world. Good luck with that.
Well, no, I take that back, since I can almost guarantee that they're going to use my ever increasing taxes to pay for stringing safety nets everywhere.
-Styopa
Oddly enough, most religions do not predict a pleasant afterlife for suicides.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
This whole article is a cop out, it's for lazy people trying to sweep the problems under the rug, so the true problems don't have to be corrected, or even identified, and no one needs to take any responsibility for any of it.
Remove the reason for someone to want to commit suicide. Give them a reason to want to live, not through pharmacology.
This is a societal problem, not an individual one, and as we progress, society gets more complicated. More pressures are placed on people to keep up, to cope, to do more. There are those that just can't cope, or do more, and therefore, aren't able to deal with the pressures.
Until the root cause of the problem is addressed, the problem will continue, and blocking the exits will only slow the most determined down, if someone wants out, they're going to find a way.
Its sad really. Sad that these people have so much pain and sad the grievous injuries some of the survivors will sustain.... sad all around. However, I just don't feel it is a valid reason to tell someone what they can and can't have at their own disposal.
Its a nice thought and good intention, its just, not justified. I don't want to tell other people what they can and can't own, I don't want my government doing that, and want it to do less of it than it does. Hell, I would constitutionally remove the right to even enact such bans for the most part.
I mean I totally understand we don't want people building bombs in the city and there needs to be some amount of sense and balance with intrinsically unsafe activities and populations,....but simple worry of self harm or potential malicous intent?
Not valid reasons if liberty and pursuit of happiness are inalienable rights.
If a person feels that death is his best path to persue happiness, I feel no right to stop him. To implore him to think on it, to hope that he changes his mind before he goes through with it, but, in the end.... its his life; his choice.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Nothing but more theory and anecdote.
"You can reduce the rate of suicide in the United States ... if fewer people had guns in their homes ..."
Total nonsense. The number of households with firearms has been on a multi-decade downward trend:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the...
Meanwhile, the suicide rate per 100k people has been quite stable at 10-15 per 100k over the last 60 years:
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/...
So where's the evidence that fewer gun-owning households means a lower suicide rate?
The ONLY consistently documented relationship between firearms and suicide is this:
"Some methods have a case fatality rate as low as 1 or 2 percent ... with a gun, it's closer to 85 or 90 percent."
True and I'm sure that in their so-called "study", the 10-15% of people who survived a self-inflicted gunshot wound regret it and claim it was an impulsive act, but that's hardly "proof" that access to firearms was a causal factor in suicide attempts.
This also raises the important question of how many people really want to die and how many are just desperate for attention. The "cry for help" suicide is a well known and documented fact. If you slice your wrists perpendicular to the length of the arm, you're either incompetent or you don't really want to commit suicide. Fire a 12 gauge shotgun in your mouth and there's zero doubt that you're genuinely trying to kill yourself.
Note also that the USA is #30 worldwide in suicide rate, far behind many countries with strict gun control laws. Take Japan for example with a rate of 20.7/100k.
This is just a bunch of leftist academics trying to further the gun control agenda without real evidence. Gun control groups like Michael Bloomberg's astroturf "Everytown" are actually pushing laws requiring that all firearms in private homes be locked up ... where they will be useless for defense. And imagine police getting search warrants and breaking down your door because someone saw a gun on your nightstand? Insanity..
How about we make suicide completely legal? Think about it. We make suicide legal, but you have to apply for it. Then you have to show up at the Department of Social Health and wait in line for 5 hours, and if that doesn't make you go "man this is ridiculous... I'll just go on living" maybe you'll actually get some real help.
Anyway, you might be right. Lets put corks in tailpipes and ban metal cutlery. That'll show those damn commie suicidal bastards that they can't take away our freedom.
Article title makes me think of a flood analogy: "World seeks to address rising sea levels with dikes, walls and dams."
Since the psychologists are powerless to do anything about the underlying causes of suicidal behavior, now they attempt to make it harder to do? Good luck with that.
I'm an atheist who has attempted suicide.
I can't speak for everyone, only myself. I can tell you the promise of something better never crossed my mind. The suicidal person isn't planning a trip to Disney Land. They've simply reached the limit of what they can cope with, and want out. As for myself, I was happy with the notion of plunging into the Void.
I am not alone in the opinion that the horrible American diet does not only cause obesity. It also causes all manner of health problems, including mental ones. If people ate healthier foods and therefore got the nutrients their bodies need, and eliminated the excess simple carbs, pesticides, pollutants, and common inflammation-causing irritants, then people would feel a hell of a lot better. We already know that depression is linked with brain inflammation, which diet customization can ameliorate. Depression is also linked with poor diet because serotonin is stored in the gut lining, which is commonly eroded in people who eat a bad diet. That's why so many people say SSRI's don't work -- there's no serotonin to selectively reuptake inhibit.
And of course, no MD would ever be smart enough to tell you to take 5HTP. That's the other problem. We're trained to think of doctors like they're priests. They're just technicians, many of whom just barely made the cut. And I wear to you, the first thing they do when you enter med school is excise the parts of your brain that contain any nutritional knowledge. When a gastroenterologist tells me he doesn't believe in food allergies, you know there's a problem. So, the one group of people we should be listening to for nutritional advice know absolutely nothing about it. In fact, it's a general incompetence among MDs (remember, most are just technicians specializing in narrow areas of medicine) that is the reason so many people are afraid of vaccines. Who's pushing the vaccines? The same people who tell you your chronic symptoms are all in your head. (Those chronic symptoms are probably nutrition-related, BTW.)
A high school in the southeastern US switched their lunch program to all healthy foods. McDonalds out. Salads and generally good variety in. Behavioral problems went down, absenteeism went down, grades went up. No surprise there. (Incidentally, shifting high school hours slightly later in the day, to adapt to the teen sleep cycle, has some similar effects, so we can't say it's ALL nutrition. That's just one major factor. Imagine doing both!)
Eat better.
You won't "plunge into the void". You need to alter your thinking.
If you think you are an atheist and not scared of death, IMO you are not a real atheist because you still have some kind of notion of something after.
Why should you be scared of nonexistence? You already know what it feels like. Just try to remember the time before you were conceived. That's what it feels like to not exist.
Not very scary, is it?
"a teenage son cannot shoot himself if he suddenly decides life is hopeless"
This really pisses me off. It's never a case of "Oh. I don't know what to do today. Guess I'll kill myself."
There are signs. There are always signs. "They're hard to see." people say. "How was I supposed to know?"
These researchers should worry more about identifying the causes and helping people with suicidal tendencies instead of trying to baby proof the world. Of course someone might feel regret mid-jump. You're not supposed to want to kill yourself. It isn't a natural state. A better public understanding of mental health would do worlds more than putting up a couple fences.
Doesn't matter, because the person committing suicide is thinking "I don't care what it is, it has to be better than this".
Corresponding data also shows a rise, almost identical in numbers to the prevented suicides, of severely depressed individuals who had to be heavily medicated. Those individuals eventually became pariahs and were conveniently not heard from again. Thus bolstering the apparent success rate of the initiative.
All those thousands of spoons, when all you need is a knife? Sounds like a scenario someone could confuse for irony.
I don't follow your logic.
How would you define nonexistence? Call it Void. Abyss. Whatever you like.
Once we're beyond that, you have to ask yourself - why be afraid of nothing?
Get it all out in the open. If someone wants to kill themselves, let them make it known. Then do-gooders like the person in this article can talk them out of it. If the person can't be convinced by any argument you can think of, let them proceed in a civilized, legal, controlled manner which allows them to abort the suicide procedure at any time.
The measures described cause lots of collateral damage: what if I want to walk on the bridge for exercise, to see the scenery? Why should my freedom be restricted? If you gave the would-be bridge-jumper a legal, abortable, civilized option, they wouldn't need the bridge anyway.
I have attempted suicide. Twice.
I'm healthy, educated, reasonably well-off. I work in tech, I'm good at what I do, and my friends tell me I should quit and be a comedian. No history of mental illness. But I had a relationship go bad in a very serious way, and the wrong genes, and the stress triggered clinical depression. That can happen. You'll find the best description of depression that I've found anywhere, here on mostly hilarious Hyperbole And A Half blog: http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com.au/2013/05/depression-part-two.html.
The state of despair is just that you don't particularily want to live any more. "Wanting to live" ceases to make any sense, and then all that's left is the shit you're dealing with, so saying to hell with it all and leaving, is as good a thing to do as any.
And it's not some ongoing active determination to jump in front of a train, or shoot yourself, that no power will stop. Don't be an idiot.
And it's not a cause or a right to die. Fuck you if you think that. Look at the graph and decide if that makes any sense at all:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide#Risk_factors
Wanting to die is a medical problem, or is temporary. Stopping it from happening is the correct thing to do.
If I hadn't messed up the first time, and panicked the second time (not wanting to live is not the same as wanting to risk being injured/disabled), I wouldn't be here. And my family would have suffered a horrible loss, my parents would have never recovered living the rest of their lives in emotional pain. If you've ever met anyone who has lost a child, it will hit home how badly and permanently it ruins lives. And my friends would have been affected too. I would have been out and away from my troubles, it's barely even about me; I would have damaged everyone around me.
People with failed suicides are frequently ambivalent about it, I've learned. It's true of me. I have no new lease on life. With my health restored I don't have a death wish any more than anyone else. It has become a source of real interest, but my personal brush is not, strangely, a source of much emotion. If you can get over the issue and get on with things, you do. And that's the most common case. The dramatic stories are the outliers, so don't put any stock in individual anecdotes. That's true of most things of course.
You'll note I haven't said a thing about the TFA. There's a reason for that, and the reason is this:
You will never find anything intelligent or worthwhile in a HughPickens.com post.
It's low-life clickbait. It's just the direct analog of "See how this mother of five lost 18kg in two days!". My advice to anyone who has read this far: Next time, if you see "HughPickens.com writes..." at the start, stop reading there. I would have, if it wasn't a headline that mattered to me. Don't bother with TFA, I haven't and I don't plan to. It will have been picked out for its clickbait potential and nothing more - it could be good, it's more likely to be worthless, but TFA is irrelevant here. I'm commenting on the comments I've read so far.
But please, don't encourage Slashdot posts from HughPickens. Find something better to read everyone. Don't feed the hugh troll.
I am an Aussie living and working in the States for the past five years. At Uni I worked for a suicide hotline and I keep up with the literature. For a long time after we instituted our stronger gun control, widespread confiscation of handguns, there were claims our suicide rates dropped. Those claims have been debunked. There were both a) methodological changes that caused an 18% drop simply due to the way counting was done. Google Australia suicide undercount" to see the peer reviewed work showing that. b) non gun methods of self caused death rose much more than the reduction in self caused death by gunshot. In Australia, as in the USA, a self inflicted gunshot is per se ruled a suicide. there must be evidence to the contrary to rule it an accident. The OPPOSITE is the case with drug overdose, poisoning, crashes, "falls" tat are really jumps, drownings at sea, co2 asphyxia, etc. Absent affirmative evidence of suicide, these are per se ruled accident. None gun self caused death rose more than double the rate of the drop in gun suicide The research shows having a gun in the household -- within a demographic group -- does not change suicide rates one iota. The 'within demographic group' is important as well. In The highest (counted) suicide and self caused death rate is later middle age men generally , with a sharper spike in in rural areas. That is true in cultures with guns and those with no guns. In the USA, that is the demographic with guns. So there is a logical and statistical fallacy in not controlling for that. The data need to be looked at with and without guns within the same demographic groups. When that is done, the presence of a gun is irrelevant to self caused death rate. This NY Times article is a gigantic disservice. More and more mental health professionals understand we may have up to 100,000 suicides per year, and with about wrongly 65,000 counted as accident, the MINORITYY are with guns. It is the WHY of suicide that is important. The "how" is irrelevant, and it is harmful and distracting to concentrate on the means.
The UK used to sell acetaminophen (AKA Tylenol) in bottles (like in the US).
Some people committed suicide by OD'ing on the pills.
So they changed from bottles to blister packs.
Now if you want to off yourself that way, you have to sit there and pop out ~50 pills, one by one.
It reduced those sucides by something like 30%.
That's a lot of lives saved, with a pretty low barrier.
Let people who want to die die quitely at home or in a hospital instead of jumping off buildings or bridges or other public nuisance methods of killing oneself...
The primal roots of suicide are buried in religion and thoughts of an after-life.
Science seems to say otherwise (in fact, religion's moral objections and lower aggression levels temper the drive to stop the current circumstances that affect everybody):
http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/abs/10.1176/appi.ajp.161.12.2303
My life belongs to me, and if it sucks, I want to end it without any interference from religious morons and brainless public administrators like Ms. Barber. Removing the means of suicide does not solve or prevent the real problem: people have less and less reasons to live.
Why should I live and get education when engineering is off-shored to brainless indians and chinese?
Why should I live and contribute to knowledge if science and research is constantly mocked, ridiculed and deprived of funding?
Why should I live when I've been treated as a insignificant cog in a corporation (which is now true for everything - even universities are run like a business)?
Why should I live when some female bitch, whose mental capacity was enough only to graduate from an obscure secondary school in a german village, is sitting in EuroParliament and blathering about shutting down nuclear fission and fusion research?
Why should I live when postdocs are lasting months? What useful science could possibly be done in couple of months?!
Why should I live when even art and music became a commodity, and are forced to cater to lowest form of human waste?
Why should I live when imbecile politicians want to turn the whole country into a large maximum security prison?!
I want to kill myself not because I cannot cope with pressures and competition, but because stupid MBA morons hijacked the system and gained power over creative and talented people. Remember those socialized schmucks who bullied and ridiculed you in high school and universities? Now they are MPAs, MBAs and your bosses - they hate you and want to crush you, because deep inside they realize that they are worthless earthworms compared to creative people. I worked hard to solve difficult problems and hence earn my Ph.D. in electrical engineering, but thanks to banksters and businessdicks, the long-term postdoc positions have vanished and even short-term postodcs are nearly impossible to find anywhere in the world.
My life belongs to me - not to a district attorney or moronic MPA. And when I want to end my life, I want my decision to be respected. It is not difficult to implement: farmers already use Controlled atmosphere killing for animals slaughter - inhaling inert gas guarantees a painless and quick death within minutes. You don't even have to build any new buildings or suicide booths - morgues are perfectly fine and can easily cope with those who want to voluntary end their lives.
Instead of stupid regulations, how about giving more reasons to live and removing the reasons for suicide? Or at least simplifying the whole process of ending one's own life? It is harder than writing useless regulations, for sure, and requires substantially more brainpower than a typical MPA possesses, but we still have some smart, educated, thinking people on this planet, aren't we?!
The person who equated this article to advocating "blocking the exits" is exactly right. The individual who actually plans to end their life in a fully conscious, fit state of mind has also surely come up with a plan that will get around any number of "blocked exit" strategies (like locking up personal guns in a cabinet, or hiding the keys to the car). They're not who this article refers to, IMO.
But the person who is distraught enough to actually go through with a plan that has a high likelihood of ending their life (as opposed to FAR more of them who might talk about it or use a half-hearted attempt as attention-seeking behavior) are going to do it when the mood strikes them. And the original article seems to be saying it's effective and appropriate to remote as many possible means to accomplish this as possible, so the means will be lacking when the mood strikes.
My problem with this is that it's only a band-aid for the underlying issue ... someone's severe depression. If it's not possible to get a person to get back the will to live, what quality of life do they have anyway, while you've "succeeded in preventing their suicide" by locking all of your knives up in a box?
I know the "Darwin Awards" are intended as a joke, but consider a purely animalistic / mathematical perspective: the individual doesn't matter to Mother Nature. Most species produce lots of offspring simply to overcome the high odds of dying before reproducing. Those odds are mostly external from predators and injury, and also include internal causes like illness, "unfitness" (in the Darwinian sense), and any kind of defect. Some calculated risk-taking is useful, but poor calculation skills (or excessive bravado despite calculation) lead to the "Darwin Awards" concept. Maybe, in the same vein, some amount of fear / depression / unhappiness is useful as a moderating influence on behavior - as often stated, courage is not the absence of fear, it is persistence despite fear - but too much of those emotions renders the individual less useful, and enough of those emotions to cause self-damage or self-killing is a trait that will self-cull from the gene pool.
Is it, then, worthwhile from a purely economical point to try to baby-proof the world, or would it be more practical to emphasize recognition and identification of people with problems for targeted help? Not to mention impinging on everybody for the safety of the few (a hot reaction in so many posts here). This has some analogy to the issue of "playground safety" meaning that children get no exercise and learn no skills because the play area must be totally safe for all activities and ability levels. At what point does making the world totally safe mean nobody can have a cooking knife?
As a member in good standing of the privileged white hegemony, I demand that all white people should be exempt from all NWO anti-suicide brainwashing. The media elilte should be happy to join me on this crusade; as they want all white people to kill themselves.
Only in the USA can you be considered to be a member of an oppressive majority, when you are in fact a minority, and make less money and have less political pull than the majority. But I guess that is my fault since I have been systematically raping and selling into sex slavery every single black and latino person I have ever met. (at least that is what I am told)
In an earlier post I made it clear that this idea about a correlation between firearms availability and suicide attempts is completely bogus. Also, the idea of making it a crime to have unlocked firearms in a home is totally insane.
Something I might be willing to consider is adding people who are admitted to an emergency room after a suicide attempt to the NICS database. At least temporarily. (NICS database contains the list of people who are prohibited from buying firearms).
Just thought of this, but maybe we should also allow people to get themselves added voluntarily! I've got no issue with that. "I think I'm a danger to myself your honor and I'd like to limit my own ability to acquire a firearm." I think they'd have to be insane to do that, but it would be their choice.
I'd be very worried about the implementation, but I think it could work. Impose a very rigid criteria for adding a person and give them a chance to argue against it in court. Then provide an inexpensive way for the person to get their name removed. Or maybe they're automatically removed after 1 year or something?
Just a thought.
One of the problems I have with people passing anti-suicide laws is the fact that some people really don't want to live. Everyone says "oh, it's a temporary condition, it can be fixed with meds, etc." but the reality is that peoples' lives are messy. If they feel that this is what they need to do to stop suffering on a regular basis, then that option should be open to them. Whether or not they're thinking clearly, it's their choice.
How would you feel about forcing someone to live through the suffering of terminal cancer or some other debilitating illness? That's what you would be doing.
The other larger macro-level problem to think about is population control. In the near future when automation has completely taken over, unemployment is high and no one can feed themselves anymore, do you really want to force a population floor? Sounds pretty cold hearted, but so is the reality of 90% unemployment and widespread poverty that awaits us shortly...
People don't commit suicide in hopes of a better afterlife. Where'd that idea even come from? Did you make it up in an uninformed attempt to smear religion? They commit suicide because they lose hope and don't think that their lives will ever get any better. The inconvenient truth is a lot of times, they're right. It's called depressive realism, look it up.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Americans are bad. Trendy diet advice. Weird diet additive 5htp, whatever that is...author assumed everyone else knew what it was, too, because the author lives in a bubble. Doctors accused of being priests instead of scientists. Accusing scientists that trained for years of being ignorant. Unnamed high school anecdote with no link. We're done here.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
This statement is just as valid for an Atheist. If ceasing to exist is better than living, then you're ready to die.
Note that your seriously suicidal Christian will be thinking "if I kill myself, the afterlife will be WORSE than simple nonexistance"....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
This reminds me of something one of my professors told me in a computer security course a long time ago. "If you want to make a computer really secure, all you have to do is turn it off, lock it in a safe and throw away the key."
What? No. You are talking out of your ass. It's about ending pain, plain and simple, whether that's physical or emotional.
Besides, most religions threaten horrible punishment for suicide.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I am not alone in the opinion that the horrible American diet does not only cause obesity. It also causes all manner of health problems, including mental ones.
And I am not alone in the opinion that you're wrong.
Caloric intake has actually remained fairly steady. It's physical activity that has declined.
http://www.foodinsight.org/new...
And there are few, at best, established connections between any given food type and risks of any disease. And it's not because we haven't looked -- we just aren't seeing them.
Not that evidence has ever affected "nutrition" advice...
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Experts and laymen have long assumed that people who died by suicide will ultimately do it even if temporarily deterred.
Yes some that are suffering will go until they are "relieved", but I am reminded of the story of Kevin Hines, the man who jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge and instantly regretted it, survived to tell us.
He states he prayed to survive and never thinks about suicide any longer.
I wonder how many other would say the same if they had survived.
http://www.theblaze.com/storie...
https://www.google.com/search?...
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
In our state it was in the homes of felons and gang members where over 90% of child gun accidents occurred. The main state newspaper looked at the past 200 shootings of children in "gun owning homes" and over and over they found the gun owner was an illegal un owners, over 90% of whom were prior felons or persons in gangs. Indeed the homes of gun owners who are not prior felons, prior criminals or gang embers are about 20% SAFER from violence than unarmed homes When you control for the fact that within any given demographic suicide rates (2/3 of gun deaths) don't change, just method changes, with or without guns, and 90% of accidents being in the homes of prior criminals, and 90% of gun homicide victims being prior criminals themselves, gun owning homes of persons not in those groups are safer than non gun owning homes! http://usatoday30.usatoday.com...
Why the fuck don't people remove the REASONS why people commit suicide in the first place? Who are these jokers who want to put all of us in rubber rooms?
I don't think this is remotely true. Most religions don't reflect kindly on suicides, and most people committing suicide aren't looking for "Anything better", they just want their pain to end. If what follows suicide is "nothing" then they will not feel pain anymore. They will feel nothing, which is preferable to someone in that kind of distress.
Religions can be credited with a lot of bad things in society but I don't think this is one of them.
People suffering horrible pain, whether mental or physical, have something to offer.
You are likely right that we stand to gain something from their continued suffering. The question is, do they stand to get something in return that is a fair bargain? When life's compensations are too little, and its costs too great, we are selfish and wrong to demand that another person go on living for our benefit.
If this were true, I'd expect the suicide rate in countries such as Japan (or many other countries) to be much lower than the U.S......unless of course the Japanese diet is worse than that in the U.S. But Of course, as you say, "we can't say it's ALL nutrition".
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
After reading all the top-rated comments here, I have to think that the Slashdot crowd has given up on evidence-based solutions to problems.
From the TFS: "Reducing the availability of highly lethal and commonly used suicide methods has been associated with declines in suicide rates of as much as 30%-50% in other countries (PDF)."
Who said anything about forbidding suicide? They are just talking about reducing the availability of easy routes to suicide. I just don't understand why anyone would be against that, as it is not impinging on anyone's rights. The only thing it does is to help prevent someone from making a rash decision while they are not thinking straight.
It's a little bit like IT security. You can't stop the people who are really determined to get to their objective, but you can stop the casual attempts. In this case, you will give people a chance to think twice about this very ultimate decision.
Your numbers sound pretty made up, especially anything that's 99% and 100%, or "in no cases." Let me guess, they were "not intended as a factual statement"?
If you get married the only usual out is divorce, which means that men in 99% of cases are on the hook for support for the rest of their lives.
According to the US Census, as cited in this excellent article analyzing child support, only 53.4% of custodial mothers are awarded child support (and only a fraction actually receive all the support they are awarded). Key chart here: https://espnfivethirtyeight.fi...
children in more than nine out of 10 cases living with their mothers
From the same article above, "18.3 percent of custodial parents in 2011 were fathers."
- In seven out of ten cases the judge ordered a transfer of the property into the wife's name
- During 160 contested cases when an order was made to sell the home the wife received more than half of the proceeds in 25 percent of the cases, during the other 75 percent the proceeds were split
In the same article, they make the point that the wife is usually poorer and has a worse employment situation, a correlation that explains most or all of this imbalance. Judges are going to award more financial support to the poorer party, and if you don't correct for that, you're presenting very misleading stats. Though given the totally made-up numbers you scattered throughout your entire post, I guess you don't care.
Gun suicides are a serious problem in the U.S.
Why??? if people dont wanna go on, why force them to???
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Would they have stopped the fate of Dr. Leonard Church in the Project Freelancer Offsite Storage Facility?
http://rvb.wikia.com/wiki/Dr._...
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
Yeah, because it's too hard for you to Google something.
For instance, many drug abusers are just slowed down self destruction that drags everyone else with them in so many ways.
Give them a choice, red or purple and be done with it all! Tired of affluenza loaded bs media stories where such and such had everything, yet felt like nothing. Give them red or purple and be done!
http://www.aisnota.com/slashdot/ Welcome to Logic and the Future
The cost of just the Golden Gate Bridge is 76M alone. It's about 2 million dollars per suicide victim in a year. Here's a thought, spend that money *on people who need treatment* instead of a 76M net that just causes them to jump a half mile down the road. The cost of a safety system dosent even begin to do the same good direct treatment does.