This report (the CDC report) is far more balanced than the dramatic 'article' linked, which uses other media sources to justify its position.
The discussion section at the bottom is particularly interesting, because it summarizes several hypotheses that might explain the cause of this increase.
Most interesting to me is the premise that it's possible that increased exposure to their children might be increasing parents' awareness of their children's behavior. Which makes it more interesting to me that more girls are brought to the hospital for suspected suicide attempts than boys.
All true. I should point out, however, that there is also the chance of a larger-than-normal percentage of suicide attempts _not_ resulting in a trip to the hospital, out of paranoid fear of infection from covid-19 if you go there. I have no great ideas on how one would estimate any of these.
No, emphatically, no, our doctors and our health care institutions did not act to minimize deaths! See for example the distribution of vaccines which did not go to demographics in proportion to their risk. It is totally unimaginable to me that men would ever be prioritized over women even when they are 60% of the fatalities in the US with similar stats for long term hospitalization. I haven’t done the math, but that surely cost us thousands or possibly tens of thousands of lives. Instead, we get endless reports in the media about how the pandemic has been hard on women! I accept that it has been hard on women, but you know, it’s at been fatal to 50% more men! Could you imagine the reporting and response if the situation were reversed? It’s a similar story for distribution to other sub populations as well, and the same basic story over and over - health care in the us is subject to politics and the politics of the health care providers themselves, typically to the detriment of all of us.
> No, emphatically, no, our doctors and our health care institutions did not act to minimize deaths!
Some tried, but yeah, mostly it's been suppressed by politics: The MATH+ protocol would've cut the death rate to about 1/3 what it currently is, but it isn't well-known because of artificial controversy over some of the drugs it uses.
Of course failing to target men more heavily was not as egregious as making it available to essential workers at the same time as older people to create more racial equity in who got the vaccine. Even though the CDC figures said that targeting older people first would have saved more lives, and even more minority lives. See https://reason.com/2020/12/18/vaccine-cdc-essential-workers-... for more on that topic.
And, of course, a lot of people simply showed up, said they delivered for DoorDash, and got the vaccine. Knowing that nobody would check up on them.
There is an element of sometimes ugly politics to this. :-(
Even in the abstract it says that hypothesis based on risk factors (which are accounted for in distribution) are the underlying cause of this distinction.
As well, this is analysis after the fact, and not at the time of the decision making - totally different.
The article that I pointed to predated the vaccines by a number of months. So it is not analysis after the fact. The Reason article that I pointed to is at the same time as the CDC policy, and pointed out that other countries were adopting a different policy at the same time. Again not analysis after the fact.
The grandparent comment is more strongly stated than I would agree with. But not wrong.
Men have consistently surpassed women in both suicide attempts and suicides (see upthread for statistics) but no one seems to care. This "why won't someone think of the women" politicking is all too common these days when in fact focusing on the highest risk group (teenage boys) would probably save more lives on an absolute scale. The same goes for COVID which has an outsized effect on men when compared to women.
We are several decades away at this rate from getting our boys better help in school, mental health support, and other things that society seems to think they don't need.
>Doctors do want the least number of deaths in the community.
Like how they won the Nobel prize for lobotomies in the seventies?
Doctors would take out sections of women's and kids brains to make them quieter so your house wife talked back less and unruly kids would calm down. And it had a 14% mortality rate
That's not a conspiracy that's documented fact.
It's logical fallacy called 'appeal to authority' that Doctors/Experts are these angels that have no agenda and just want what's best for us. They can be wrong and are quite often.
There's absolutely no evidence for either of the points you're making. If what you're saying wasn't a mainstream narrative it could be considered a conspiracy theory. The only difference between religion and a cult is mainstream acceptance.
Most of the country has lifted covid restrictions fully and we're only at 40%ish vaccination rate.
If you were correct and mask usage was effective we would see infection surges instead of RECORD LOW numbers of covid cases all over the country.
All of it was medical theater and was never necessary to begin with there's no proof otherwise.
It's okay to admit you were wrong and light of new evidence.
Imagine a pill that completely cures cancer, 100% of the time. But maybe one in a million pills gets stuck in someone's throat and they choke to death.
So instead of 10 million cancer deaths per year, suddenly we see zero. But also 10 extra choking deaths.
"The Anti-Cancer Pill caused 10 people to choke to death this year. In contrast, 0 people died of cancer. 10 is much bigger than 0! Why hasn't this pill been banned immediately?"
Were people that unaware to not expect covid restrictions to have massive corollary side effects like inflation, increase suicides, massive evictions, increases in homelessness, massive loss of small businesses, addiction increases, and countless more social problems....
This article about suicides are just one of many in a massive list of side effects from questionable government overreach into our lives.
Everyone but the rich are going to pay for this lockdown in numerous ways for the foreseeable future.
Are you trying to assert that hospitals wouldn't have been overwhelmed if we didn't lock down at all? Even the people that wanted to go with the 'let everyone get sick for herd immunity' plan weren't going that far!
> That makes as much sense as wanting to increase government regulations but defund police to enforce those new regulations.
...what's the contradiction? You don't enforce regulations with police.
Using police for the wrong job is half of the problem that "defund the police" is trying to address.
If it's so plain and clear, please post the evidence that lockdowns prevented hospitals from being overwhelmed.
Meanwhile, in Texas all Covid restrictions were lifted in March... and no co-oresponding surge in infections were recorded, infections decrease to record lows actually..only 16% had received first dose of vaccine, TX was 48th in vaccination rates.
Florida and other states had similar results when they lifted restrictions.
From here the evidence appears to be in favor of lockdowns having no effect.
"Died of lockdown" is attributing causation in a way that this paper does not attempt to justify.
Even if there is a causal relationship, there's not enough evidence to conclude that it's a direct causal relationship between lockdown and suicide, let alone between masks/testing and suicide (what?).
For instance, I'd bet that at least a few of the excess deaths are from harmful parents - whether physically abusive, intolerant of something about their kid's identity, etc. In my social circles I know a whole lot of people who have a strained if not nonexistent relationship with their parents and for whom leaving home for college quite literally saved their life. I can easily see a loss of hope for students in their final years of high school, and the study also includes 18-25-year-olds - which includes students who had already moved to dorms and were then sent home.
These kids probably could have survived lockdown just fine, were they living on their own or in a supportive household. They just didn't survive their parents. The causal relationship is that we instituted lockdown without any regard for harmful family situations.
It seems both possible and ethical to study statements made by people who died by suicide (suicide notes, public social media posts, statements to friends, etc.), and I think that would be a lot more scientifically useful for the cause of preventing suicide than assuming that the reason was that they didn't like lockdown per se.
folks over 65 and 40% BMI got their go in life. prioritizing around the make makes more sense to me.
thankfully the lockdowns are no stomach anymore in most of the states. a visit to an airport and any city not in california or ny and you can see and feel the difference in an instant.
My guess is lockdowns and school closures probably drive substantially more suicides than masks and testing. I doubt the latter two move the needle much.
“Died of lockdown” - choice word “of” and not “during”, completely ignoring the myriad confounding variables going on during this one year period (eg social media changes).
Regarding the lockdown comment, again I’ll write that things don’t exist in a vacuum- optimizing policy over a demographic with 23 deaths, at the expense of demographics with hundreds of thousands of deaths, is probably not a trade many politicians/public health officials/etc think is good.
But who knows, maybe guy-in-the-chat knows better. Should probably brush up on his basic stats first, though!.
Yes, if you do the math, the difference is a whopping 3 people. Basically, well within a statistical margin of error, and this is if we (wrongly) assume that the trend is 100% due to COVID.
Meanwhile, COVID affects other populations at a much greater degree. So, no statistical change in harm to children, and a much greater benefit for adults. That's why the restrictions make sense.
Well, lockdowns have ended in most places. Even in Michigan, which had the last big spike in the U.S. (so far), the governor decided not to use a lockdown. Now this may have been primarily because it didn't appear to have had much beneficial impact; this is further supported by the fact that Michigan's last spike ended just as quickly as the prior ones when there were lockdowns. However, it may be that the impact on mental health had some influence over the governor's decision.
Our society hadn't really dealt with a pandemic of this size since 1919 (although that one was far bigger), and hadn't dealt with a pandemic of any significant size since 1968, so clearly we did some things wrong. It's kind of like a military which has not fought a war in decades; you can expect them to not be very good at strategy for the first year.
By the way, masks and "endless testing" do not cause anywhere remotely as much stress as lockdowns, I don't believe.
Umm .. 24% increase to 134 means, what, 26 extra deaths? And how many more than 23 would have died due to COVID without mitigations (quite aside from teenagers being vectors.) So you are saying entirely lift all mitigations due to a couple of dozen (very sad) deaths in the middle of literally 100s of thousands of deaths, and also exclude e.g. reduction in other deaths due to reduced transport and other infections.
So, yeah, the restrictions haven't been immediately lifted because that would be entirely unjustified.
I was thinking about this. it would explain the increase. but actually the CDC numbers show that absolute numbers are much higher for girls; although, it's only for this narrow study
How do you come to that conclusion? The CDC data is tracking the number of hospitalizations. If the suicide attempt results in a hospitalization, that sounds pretty serious to me.
Hospitalization is generally mandated for any expression of an immediate intent to kill one's self, even if there isn't an attempt at all. So there is a line-drawing problem; if someone says they tried to kill themselves even if what they tried obviously wouldn't work (e.g. surface-level cuts away from blood vessels) their attempt could "result in hospitalization" even though hospitalization would have theoretically resulted even if no attempt had been made.
This still doesn't sound like an overly broad definition of suicide-attempt to me. Somebody saying they want to die and giving themselves minor cuts seems like a pretty serious situation. Unless the supposition is that boys don't get hospitalized when they do the same sort of thing, number of hospitalizations sounds like a robust metric.
It is serious. Just pointing out a way that someone could think there's room for narrowing the definition. Obviously any suicidal ideation may need help; categories that aren't totally clear can just make it harder to decide what sorts of resources and interventions to prioritize on a systems level.
how else to explain the fact that number of attempts is higher for women yet number of suicides is lower? it means number of attempts can't predict number of suicides, so it is counting something unrelated.
It's counting suicide attempts, not suicides. Obviously one rate does not predict the other, but does that mean suicide attempts aren't worth tracking? I don't think so.
And I don't know how to explain the discrepancy, but that's what the data says. Being unable to explain the data doesn't mean the data is wrong.
Sure... but I was responding to the assertion that the discrepancy in suicide attempts comes from suicide attempts being over-counted. I don't think that holds water.
The data for suicide statistics have been polluted in in some rather peculiar ways. Hospitalizations for any self-harm-related injury, no matter how obviously sublethal, are categorized as suicide attempts.
>Hospitalizations related to suicide attempts were defined as the presence of ICD-9 codes E950 to E959 in the first accident code for a patient discharged alive. This ICD-9 category includes injuries resulting from attempted suicide, as well as self-inflicted injuries specified as intentional, but without suicidal intent.
So that will deceptively inflate the statistics for whichever gender self harms more frequently... which turns out to be girls and women.
>The goal of the current study was to use meta-analytic techniques to better conceptualize the presence and size of gender differences in the prevalence of NSSI (non-suicidal self injury) The results showed that across studies women were significantly more likely to report a history of NSSI than men.
This next study tries to investigate that issue by breaking down "suicide attempts" by degree of actual suicidal intent. They devised a spectrum ranging from deliberate self harm to suicidal gestures to serious attempts to end one's life. Surprise surprise, the self-harm end of that spectrum is more populated by females and the serious-attempt end is more populated by males.
>*A significant association between suicide intent and gender was found, where ‘Serious Suicide Attempts’ (SSA) were rated significantly more frequently in males than females.*
There is also an undercounting of men who attempt suicide by hospital staff. A recent Australian study showed that the number of men attempting suicide was much greater based on reports of first responders compared to hospital staff, but the latter being the current source of statistics.
> Provisional mortality data found an overall decrease in the age-adjusted suicide rate from quarter 3 (July–September) of 2019 to quarter 3 of 2020. The suicide rate among young persons aged 15–24 years during this same period saw no significant change (9).
So in other words: what changed was the rate of emergency department admissions, not actual suicides. I would wonder if lockdowns meant that more suicide attempts were made near family, who would then notice the attempt and take the person to the ED.
In the context of cyberbullying, I have seen assertions that teenage girls are typically more impacted by social stress than teenage boys. If this were the case, then we might expect that being deprived of social contact entirely would also have a bigger impact on teenage girls than teenage boys.
How one could objectively measure whether girls are, in fact, more impacted by social stress, is not something I know the answer to.
Girls and women can tend to communicate distress through self-harm, i.e. "martyrdom". It is a potent "tool" because because harm to women is considered so heinous, and something that requires alleviation. It has deep roots in gender-roles where females are supposed to passive and males active, possibly even biology.
Sounds pretty authoritarian...but still I cringe to see this downvoted. Perhaps "Educate about the dangers of social media, and promote health, responsible, reverent use, because the kids are gonna do it either way"...
Browse HN threads on any other topic like guns, tobacco, or energy/climate change, and read multitude of harsher, simplistic responses to what are really tough challenges.
But watch the mellow language, the "nuanced response", the "it's a complicated problem" when it comes down to the holy cows.
I think it's fair to say HN is pretty pro-regulation. Strongly regulate social media, or ban it altogether. It's literally killing people, ruining relationships, perverting elections. It's a net negative by objective metrics.
I understand the reaction to this maybe-slightly-over-simplistic statement, but there's definitely a conversation to be had about defanging at least the most the toxic effects of social media. Unfortunately we're still in the "gold rush" era of social media, societal health be damned.
> Brett Cooper is a professional actress and a Libertarian-Conservative writer. She’s an ambassador for PragerU and TurningPoint USA and content manager at Unwoke Narrative
This while we're getting news that the Delta strain is infecting fully vaccinated populations...while we're at full-steam-ahead towards July 4th...I would not be surprised if the lionshare of progress we've made towards ending this pandemic is nullified before September.
I'd be inclined to agree with the narrative that "Social Media platforms promote toxic engagement, which has a causal link to increased suicide among youth"...but you went for the knee-jerk reaction angle and so you're doing more harm than good to the point you're trying to make.
its interesting that female numbers are way higher that the males. Looks like males usually chose a more lethal method [1]
In Japan the suicide numbers has increased among women [2]
Creepy hypothesis on why it affected teenage girls way more than teenage boys: more girls are stuck at home with someone they desperately want to get away from. This would also explain why there was not a similar increase in 18-25 year old women.
I’ve dealt with suicidal depression most of my life. Around 30 I survived a lethal attempt and afterwards put all of my resources and attention into mental health care / diagnosis. It was quite the slog and extremely expensive and much of it not covered by my very nice PPO. One of the most useful things for my issues (undiagnosed ADHD, PTSD, and ASD) was Dialectical Behavioral Therapy in a group setting. 90% of the people getting mental health care in the groups I was in were teen girls and young women. The only other men I ever saw were divorced dads trying to get visitation rights back so they could see their kids.
From my experience working through that, but also just out in the world I’ve found that young men frequently take up extremely risky behaviors with a disregard for their safety to cope with similar internal turmoil. Obviously, some take the direct route. I’ve lost a couple friends to immeasurable despair.
In the USA at least the mental health system is so fucking screwed. I’m not saying young women have it better, but the antiquated biases are very much present in clinicians, researchers, and really everyone else. Women are emotional, protect them... but also a huge amount of medical pros don’t believe a woman can be passing autistic. Men/boys just need to “walk it off”. Largely even seeking help for mental distress is seen as something weak people do. It’s abysmal. If a study doesn’t address those very real biases in our culture, I don’t know if you can draw a useful conclusion.
Having talked to my nieces and nephews and some of their friends (aged 10-22ish, probably a sample set of 15 kids that I know) something that I know even from before the pandemic is that they are acutely aware of how fucked they are and that the world as it’s set up is just fucking them harder and seems pathologically geared to continue to do so. They don’t even have the words to articulate it how I have here, they internalize it and try to grok it from the inside out. They put a smile on and do their best to seem normal. We need to listen to the kids and their despair. It’s ridiculous to say that it’s just that they are upset about having to spend time with someone they don’t like. We are boiling and this is the first of many plagues. The boomers borrowed from the future and are willing to ride it till the wheels fall off.... The kids have the internet and very much know what the world has set up for them.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 149 ms ] threadThe discussion section at the bottom is particularly interesting, because it summarizes several hypotheses that might explain the cause of this increase.
Most interesting to me is the premise that it's possible that increased exposure to their children might be increasing parents' awareness of their children's behavior. Which makes it more interesting to me that more girls are brought to the hospital for suspected suicide attempts than boys.
More teenagers died of lockdown, than died with COVID.
Why havn't all restrictions across the land (including masks and endless testing) ceased immediately?
1. because it’s only due to the masks and endless testing the Covid death count is so low
2. Without the masks and endless testing, young people would infect many many older people, creating even more deaths
This isn’t a conspiracy. Doctors do want the least number of deaths in the community.
Some tried, but yeah, mostly it's been suppressed by politics: The MATH+ protocol would've cut the death rate to about 1/3 what it currently is, but it isn't well-known because of artificial controversy over some of the drugs it uses.
Of course failing to target men more heavily was not as egregious as making it available to essential workers at the same time as older people to create more racial equity in who got the vaccine. Even though the CDC figures said that targeting older people first would have saved more lives, and even more minority lives. See https://reason.com/2020/12/18/vaccine-cdc-essential-workers-... for more on that topic.
And, of course, a lot of people simply showed up, said they delivered for DoorDash, and got the vaccine. Knowing that nobody would check up on them.
There is an element of sometimes ugly politics to this. :-(
As well, this is analysis after the fact, and not at the time of the decision making - totally different.
So parent is emphatically wrong.
The grandparent comment is more strongly stated than I would agree with. But not wrong.
Men have consistently surpassed women in both suicide attempts and suicides (see upthread for statistics) but no one seems to care. This "why won't someone think of the women" politicking is all too common these days when in fact focusing on the highest risk group (teenage boys) would probably save more lives on an absolute scale. The same goes for COVID which has an outsized effect on men when compared to women.
We are several decades away at this rate from getting our boys better help in school, mental health support, and other things that society seems to think they don't need.
Like how they won the Nobel prize for lobotomies in the seventies?
Doctors would take out sections of women's and kids brains to make them quieter so your house wife talked back less and unruly kids would calm down. And it had a 14% mortality rate
That's not a conspiracy that's documented fact.
It's logical fallacy called 'appeal to authority' that Doctors/Experts are these angels that have no agenda and just want what's best for us. They can be wrong and are quite often.
There's absolutely no evidence for either of the points you're making. If what you're saying wasn't a mainstream narrative it could be considered a conspiracy theory. The only difference between religion and a cult is mainstream acceptance.
Most of the country has lifted covid restrictions fully and we're only at 40%ish vaccination rate.
If you were correct and mask usage was effective we would see infection surges instead of RECORD LOW numbers of covid cases all over the country.
All of it was medical theater and was never necessary to begin with there's no proof otherwise.
It's okay to admit you were wrong and light of new evidence.
So instead of 10 million cancer deaths per year, suddenly we see zero. But also 10 extra choking deaths.
"The Anti-Cancer Pill caused 10 people to choke to death this year. In contrast, 0 people died of cancer. 10 is much bigger than 0! Why hasn't this pill been banned immediately?"
A more accurate analogy is only 20% of the population 55 or up is vulnerable to cancer.
Now the government puts everyone in a straight jacket with no end in sight to keep that 20% safe.
Now substitute the word cancer for covid and straight jacket for lockdown.
More people die of car accidents yearly than died of covid in the 80% of the population that is below 55 years old.
The average death from covid is 80 years old with multiple comorbidities.
We appear to be totally fine as a society to let kids kill themselves to save unhealthy old people.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...
https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/
And if you're going to compare potential covid deaths to car deaths then you should compare suicide to car deaths too.
This article about suicides are just one of many in a massive list of side effects from questionable government overreach into our lives.
Everyone but the rich are going to pay for this lockdown in numerous ways for the foreseeable future.
And can motivate suicides!
Also the numbers in your analysis are totally forgetting the part about hospitals getting overwhelmed and death rates spiking.
> Everyone but the rich are going to pay for this lockdown in numerous ways for the foreseeable future.
Well, let's take more of their money to fix basic societal problems like lack of housing and addiction treatment.
Please provide a source for that and not just a source that says 'near capacity'.
E.R.s constantly operate 'near capacity'.
> Well, let's take more of their money
So use the government to fix the problems that the government created?
That makes as much sense as wanting to increase government regulations but defund police to enforce those new regulations.
> That makes as much sense as wanting to increase government regulations but defund police to enforce those new regulations.
...what's the contradiction? You don't enforce regulations with police.
Using police for the wrong job is half of the problem that "defund the police" is trying to address.
Meanwhile, in Texas all Covid restrictions were lifted in March... and no co-oresponding surge in infections were recorded, infections decrease to record lows actually..only 16% had received first dose of vaccine, TX was 48th in vaccination rates.
Florida and other states had similar results when they lifted restrictions.
From here the evidence appears to be in favor of lockdowns having no effect.
Even if we did prioritize the hundred over the thousands, I see ending lockdowns, but what's your justification for ending mask policies and testing?
Even if there is a causal relationship, there's not enough evidence to conclude that it's a direct causal relationship between lockdown and suicide, let alone between masks/testing and suicide (what?).
For instance, I'd bet that at least a few of the excess deaths are from harmful parents - whether physically abusive, intolerant of something about their kid's identity, etc. In my social circles I know a whole lot of people who have a strained if not nonexistent relationship with their parents and for whom leaving home for college quite literally saved their life. I can easily see a loss of hope for students in their final years of high school, and the study also includes 18-25-year-olds - which includes students who had already moved to dorms and were then sent home.
These kids probably could have survived lockdown just fine, were they living on their own or in a supportive household. They just didn't survive their parents. The causal relationship is that we instituted lockdown without any regard for harmful family situations.
It seems both possible and ethical to study statements made by people who died by suicide (suicide notes, public social media posts, statements to friends, etc.), and I think that would be a lot more scientifically useful for the cause of preventing suicide than assuming that the reason was that they didn't like lockdown per se.
folks over 65 and 40% BMI got their go in life. prioritizing around the make makes more sense to me.
thankfully the lockdowns are no stomach anymore in most of the states. a visit to an airport and any city not in california or ny and you can see and feel the difference in an instant.
Regarding the lockdown comment, again I’ll write that things don’t exist in a vacuum- optimizing policy over a demographic with 23 deaths, at the expense of demographics with hundreds of thousands of deaths, is probably not a trade many politicians/public health officials/etc think is good.
But who knows, maybe guy-in-the-chat knows better. Should probably brush up on his basic stats first, though!.
Meanwhile, COVID affects other populations at a much greater degree. So, no statistical change in harm to children, and a much greater benefit for adults. That's why the restrictions make sense.
> Why havn't all restrictions across the land (including masks and endless testing) ceased immediately?
"across the land"? What kind of medieval clown talk is that lol
Our society hadn't really dealt with a pandemic of this size since 1919 (although that one was far bigger), and hadn't dealt with a pandemic of any significant size since 1968, so clearly we did some things wrong. It's kind of like a military which has not fought a war in decades; you can expect them to not be very good at strategy for the first year.
By the way, masks and "endless testing" do not cause anywhere remotely as much stress as lockdowns, I don't believe.
So, yeah, the restrictions haven't been immediately lifted because that would be entirely unjustified.
[1] https://time.com/5590344/youth-suicide-rates/
Edit: The Time article links to original JAMA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_differences_in_suicide
And I don't know how to explain the discrepancy, but that's what the data says. Being unable to explain the data doesn't mean the data is wrong.
People who aren’t being listened to sometimes take an overdose as a cry for help, expecting to be found. They still go to hospital.
That is quite different from shooting yourself in the head.
> Suicide attempts have always been way more frequent among women/girls, whereas men/boys actually commit suicide more often.
The data for suicide statistics have been polluted in in some rather peculiar ways. Hospitalizations for any self-harm-related injury, no matter how obviously sublethal, are categorized as suicide attempts.
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/en/pub/82-003-x/2001002/arti... (pdf)
>Hospitalizations related to suicide attempts were defined as the presence of ICD-9 codes E950 to E959 in the first accident code for a patient discharged alive. This ICD-9 category includes injuries resulting from attempted suicide, as well as self-inflicted injuries specified as intentional, but without suicidal intent.
So that will deceptively inflate the statistics for whichever gender self harms more frequently... which turns out to be girls and women.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25795294
>The goal of the current study was to use meta-analytic techniques to better conceptualize the presence and size of gender differences in the prevalence of NSSI (non-suicidal self injury) The results showed that across studies women were significantly more likely to report a history of NSSI than men.
This next study tries to investigate that issue by breaking down "suicide attempts" by degree of actual suicidal intent. They devised a spectrum ranging from deliberate self harm to suicidal gestures to serious attempts to end one's life. Surprise surprise, the self-harm end of that spectrum is more populated by females and the serious-attempt end is more populated by males.
>*A significant association between suicide intent and gender was found, where ‘Serious Suicide Attempts’ (SSA) were rated significantly more frequently in males than females.*
There is also an undercounting of men who attempt suicide by hospital staff. A recent Australian study showed that the number of men attempting suicide was much greater based on reports of first responders compared to hospital staff, but the latter being the current source of statistics.
https://www.beyondblue.org.au/media/news/news/2019/05/28/sui...
> Provisional mortality data found an overall decrease in the age-adjusted suicide rate from quarter 3 (July–September) of 2019 to quarter 3 of 2020. The suicide rate among young persons aged 15–24 years during this same period saw no significant change (9).
So in other words: what changed was the rate of emergency department admissions, not actual suicides. I would wonder if lockdowns meant that more suicide attempts were made near family, who would then notice the attempt and take the person to the ED.
How one could objectively measure whether girls are, in fact, more impacted by social stress, is not something I know the answer to.
But watch the mellow language, the "nuanced response", the "it's a complicated problem" when it comes down to the holy cows.
I think it's fair to say HN is pretty pro-regulation. Strongly regulate social media, or ban it altogether. It's literally killing people, ruining relationships, perverting elections. It's a net negative by objective metrics.
No half assed hypocritical solutions.
> Brett Cooper is a professional actress and a Libertarian-Conservative writer. She’s an ambassador for PragerU and TurningPoint USA and content manager at Unwoke Narrative
The average death from covid is 80 years old with multiple comorbidities.
We appear to be totally fine as a society to let kids kill themselves to save unhealthy old people.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...
https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_differences_in_suicide 2 - https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2021/02/24/national/social...
From my experience working through that, but also just out in the world I’ve found that young men frequently take up extremely risky behaviors with a disregard for their safety to cope with similar internal turmoil. Obviously, some take the direct route. I’ve lost a couple friends to immeasurable despair.
In the USA at least the mental health system is so fucking screwed. I’m not saying young women have it better, but the antiquated biases are very much present in clinicians, researchers, and really everyone else. Women are emotional, protect them... but also a huge amount of medical pros don’t believe a woman can be passing autistic. Men/boys just need to “walk it off”. Largely even seeking help for mental distress is seen as something weak people do. It’s abysmal. If a study doesn’t address those very real biases in our culture, I don’t know if you can draw a useful conclusion.
Having talked to my nieces and nephews and some of their friends (aged 10-22ish, probably a sample set of 15 kids that I know) something that I know even from before the pandemic is that they are acutely aware of how fucked they are and that the world as it’s set up is just fucking them harder and seems pathologically geared to continue to do so. They don’t even have the words to articulate it how I have here, they internalize it and try to grok it from the inside out. They put a smile on and do their best to seem normal. We need to listen to the kids and their despair. It’s ridiculous to say that it’s just that they are upset about having to spend time with someone they don’t like. We are boiling and this is the first of many plagues. The boomers borrowed from the future and are willing to ride it till the wheels fall off.... The kids have the internet and very much know what the world has set up for them.