America's Suicide Rate Declined in 2020 - Despite Lockdowns (cbsnews.com) 126
CBS News reports:
The number of U.S. suicides fell nearly 6% last year amid the coronavirus pandemic — the largest annual decline in at least four decades, according to preliminary government data. Death certificates are still coming in and the count could rise. But officials expect a substantial decline will endure, despite worries that COVID-19 could lead to more suicides.
It is hard to say exactly why suicide deaths dropped so much, but one factor may be a phenomenon seen in the early stages of wars and national disasters, some experts suggested. "There's a heroism phase in every disaster period, where we're banding together and expressing lots of messages of support that we're in this together," said Dr. Christine Moutier, chief medical officer of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. "You saw that, at least in the early months of the pandemic." An increase in the availability of telehealth services and other efforts to turn around the nation's suicide problem may have also contributed, she said.
U.S. suicides steadily rose from the early 2000s until 2018, when the national suicide rate hit its highest level since 1941. The rate finally fell slightly in 2019. Experts credited increased mental health screenings and other suicide prevention efforts. The number fell further last year, to below 45,000, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a recent report. It was the lowest number of U.S. suicide deaths since 2015.
MarketWatch also points out that in the U.S. in 2020, "Total deaths increased by 17.7% year over year, the provisional estimates showed.
"COVID-19 became the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer, while suicide dropped from the country's 10th leading cause of death to the 11th.
It is hard to say exactly why suicide deaths dropped so much, but one factor may be a phenomenon seen in the early stages of wars and national disasters, some experts suggested. "There's a heroism phase in every disaster period, where we're banding together and expressing lots of messages of support that we're in this together," said Dr. Christine Moutier, chief medical officer of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. "You saw that, at least in the early months of the pandemic." An increase in the availability of telehealth services and other efforts to turn around the nation's suicide problem may have also contributed, she said.
U.S. suicides steadily rose from the early 2000s until 2018, when the national suicide rate hit its highest level since 1941. The rate finally fell slightly in 2019. Experts credited increased mental health screenings and other suicide prevention efforts. The number fell further last year, to below 45,000, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a recent report. It was the lowest number of U.S. suicide deaths since 2015.
MarketWatch also points out that in the U.S. in 2020, "Total deaths increased by 17.7% year over year, the provisional estimates showed.
"COVID-19 became the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer, while suicide dropped from the country's 10th leading cause of death to the 11th.
Curses! (Score:2, Funny)
Foiled again
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Rate of gun ownership rose (Score:1)
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Sure, the number if firearms is up, but ammunition has been in short supply. Perhaps the answer is what Chris Rock said all along, drive the cost of each bullet up to $5000 and watch murder/suicide drop.
https://www.gunsandammo.com/ed... [gunsandammo.com]
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> Perhaps the answer is what Chris Rock said all along, drive the cost of each bullet up to $5000 and watch murder/suicide drop.
So instead of people killing themselves, you have people walking around wishing they were dead.
All we need now is "Mission Accomplished" banner and a presidential speech on an aircraft carrier and I'm sold.
Re:Rate of gun ownership rose (Score:5, Insightful)
So instead of people killing themselves, you have people walking around wishing they were dead.
I knew a girl in high school who was driving with her two younger siblings in the car and was hit head on by someone trying to suicide. I wish someone had given the asshole a gun. And stop calling that "gun violence" since it can be worse without the gun.
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Biden Administration:
- Refuses to further promote BLM about their racism narrative - OK
- Tells students they can't discharge their student debt - OK
- Tells 'refugees' it's open season on the border - BAD
- Re-opens the "cages for kids" facilities - BAD
- Resumes construction on the border wall - OK
- Implements EO to kill energy independence - BAD
- Resumes bombing of Syrian civilians - OK
- Backtracks on $15 minimum wage - OK
- Falls on stairs after making fun of someone else going down a ramp - OK
- Ignores MSM
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Says no portion of the constitution is absolute - BAD
Perhaps he should ask black people whether the 13th amendment should be absolute.
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It's true that ammunition has been in short supply but if you need more than one round to commit suicide you're doing something horribly wrong.
It hasn't been that hard to get ammunition at some price and, seriously, after using one round from the very expensive box you bought, you leave your heirs 49 rounds of valuable ammunition so it's an investment you pass on...
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This is what I've been saying all year. You don't need to be concerned with the number of guns being sold. You need to be more concerned with all the ammunition that people are stock piling. People are buying cans of 10K of .223 rounds. Outside of a military uprising I can only think of a few reasons to have that much .223 ammo. Maybe hog shooting in Texas.
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You are aware that Nato 5.56 and the Remington 223 are practically the same round. There are some minor difference in chamber pressure and chamber leades but for all practical purpose they are identical.
Perhaps, you are thinking of the 22 cal round.
This has been studied in the past (Score:5, Interesting)
Basically we reduced the key stressors that make people kill themselves.
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Man, Poe's law hit this comment like a brick.
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But auto accidents are up despite less miles (Score:3)
Could the rise in single car accident deaths be misclassified as accidental and actually mask a hidden number of suicides?
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Re:But auto accidents are up despite less miles (Score:5, Insightful)
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DUIs. They never shut down the pot shops and cocktail lounges through the pandemic. People are not working and don't have a boss to answer to for being sh*t-faced.
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I don't drive like an old lady, but I'm not a nut. I like to think I'm somewhere in the middle, maybe leaning towards cautious. I live in a rural area and can't say I've noticed too much difference but the one thing that happened just recently really got to me.
I was on a two-lane and there was a car in front of me going a bit more slowly, but not frustratingly slow. So I hung back a reasonable distance and just followed along, knowing that a passing lane would open up. There are also turn-outs, which in
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Stuck between the bully and the slow driver. I will often withdraw and let them handle it between them. It helps that I consider myself the better driver.
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This works great if you've got two full lanes to work with. I've done that and watched the pointless tussle in a high-speed pack play out ahead of me, theater of the absurd.
In my one lane with a turn-out scenario, I suppose I could have taken the hit, broke hard and stopped in the short turn-out and let it all go by. Maybe I would have come away in a better mood.
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I agree. You can't avoid all of them, and you don't necessarily want to avoid all of them.
Not likely (Score:2)
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Step 1: acknowledge people/companies are motived by financial incentives when it fits your narrative
Step 2: disregard everything from step 1 when the government pays the state for COVID cases/deaths and assume the numbers are legit
www.fark.com/politics -- yup
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> mouth breathing retard
The hypocrisy makes me angry too. But instead of channeling it into comments about retards, question the narrative when it doesn't make sense. It is quite freeing.
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What would they be paying for?
If it's a single car accident then the insured vehicle is destroyed but the policy holder is now dead and unlikely to claim on it. If a guy drives his car off a bridge, or into a tree at high speed the only affected party is dead, and the cops will clean up the resulting mess.
They would investigate on a life insurance claim, but many people don't have life insurance.
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The issues for actual knowing is the lack of evidence of suicide notes in some cases.
While this articles reports that suicides are down, other reports say sucides are UP. Who do you believe? Which reporting group has the strongest motivation to lie, that is, misreport or mis-classify the deaths. Personally, the source for this post is thoroughly lacking when other
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I came to this thread fully expecting the QAnon Contingent to be well represented here, and they did not disappoint.
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Yes, the rise in single car accidents would indicate that the single-car-suicides are misclassified. This has been reported for decades.
Possibly, but reckless driving has also been on the increase.
And besides, I'm not persuaded that the pandemic caused a massive shift in non-vehicular to vehicular suicide methods (as would be required to explain the data).
One thing that is universally reported is that suicides of K-12 children has risen sharply. So maybe the overall has gone done but the "For The Children" demographics has gone UP -- that is, children are committing suicide and noticeably higher numbers.
Is it?
I looked, and there's clusters as always, but I had trouble finding people mentioning the sharp rise you spoke of, much less universal reporting of it. In fact, the best resource I found mentioned only "the National Child Mortality Database has identified a concerning signal that dea [bmj.com]
Re:But auto accidents are up despite less miles (Score:5, Insightful)
... While this articles reports that suicides are down, other reports say sucides are UP. Who do you believe? Which reporting group has the strongest motivation to lie, that is, misreport or mis-classify the deaths. Personally, the source for this post is thoroughly lacking when other sources came out previously and on the opposite side of the argument.!
Reports? I've seen a number of people saying suicides are up but I don't think any of the ones I saw actually had any reports with factual data. The article links to an actual report on the Journal of American Medicine Association. What have you got?
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Yahoo News [yahoo.com]
Age Brackets (Score:5, Insightful)
Mental health people have been saying teen suicide was up 150%.
Are many of the normal suicides elderly people who are at the end of their healthspan? Because lots of them got wiped out by the virus.
A single scalar can't tell a useful story.
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Agreed. One of my wife's best friends deals with people (primarily teens to early 20's) with mental health issues. She's said many times that this group of people has had a really hard time with isolation and social distancing leading to an increase in suicides and attempted suicides. As this is her job I'm more prone to believe her and her resources over CBS. But I also tend to trust JAMA and follow them closely. Maybe there is an increase in certain regions but overall it's down? Dunno...
Something seems o
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Teen suicides (and moreso the number of teens considered at-risk) are what scare the living shit out of me. Even among kids that have maintained reasonable normalcy to their lives there is just this air of abstraction and a disconnect with people that I hadn’t noticed before.
But, at the same time I’ve seen a number of kids that are excelling and really growing with covid. There might be a wealth gap between the two groups that would explain away much of it, but there is more to it.
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Re:Age Brackets (Score:5, Informative)
(Go click on the link and find the figure - it presents the numbers in graphical format.) So yes the elderly (especially males) have a higher rate of suicide. I was unable to find the raw 2020 data on the CDC site to compare by age group. Will be interesting to see that when it comes out.
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Mental health people have been saying teen suicide was up 150%.
Citation Needed.
Gender Breakdown (Score:4, Interesting)
to broke to buy a noose... (Score:2)
anyway, what I really want to know is what the divorce rate will be after so much tire wear on relationships from the last 12 months of being cooped up will be...
Yepp. People are forced ... (Score:2)
... to be more chill. That sure helps.
He died of natural causes (Score:2, Funny)
“He jumped out of a window!”
“Gravity is natural.”
“I’ll just put down Covid-19.”
Maybe it's the people with social anxiety (Score:2)
Who aren't killing themselves now because the lockdown is making life easier for them.
This was already debunked. (Score:2)
impossible (Score:2)
UBI did the trick (Score:1)
All those stimulus checks and unemployment was a big help for people with depression. It isn't technically a UBI but in most studies, people who got a UBI felt less stressed. That's what I think is happening here.
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It's not a UBI but it is money from the government like a UBI would work. While I'm sure most people would have preferred to work, I'm sure those same people would also be happier to receive some money. This helps you when times are tough, like when you're between jobs or determining if this job is for you. Extra spending cash to buy something you've wanted or pay bills.
WFH = inner peace (Score:2)
It's going to the office that makes people suicidal. Not to mention murderous.
Well, I was wrong (Score:2)
I was in the camp which predicted suicides would spike in 2020. I hope this result holds up and that I was dead wrong.
I predicted increased domestic violence and divorces. I hope I'm wrong about that too.
'Despite lockdowns'? (Score:2)
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I know this is the festering GQP persistent suspicion. And it didn't take long to appear in this story.
But note, actual individual doctors, write down the cause of death on death certificates, not some deep state cabal designed to take down Trump. And the truth of the matter is the number of Covid deaths were under-reported - especially early on when testing capacity was limited.
https://www.scientificamerican... [scientificamerican.com]
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/new... [umn.edu]
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Serious question - Do you actually believe that doctors gets paid by the federal government by filling out death certificates?
No, they get paid by their bosses - hospital administrators.
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My kid's in a residency program and it's basically useless now because all the teachers are off treating COVID patients and the kid's stuck doing line work instead of training (which they took a pay cut for)...
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Their wages yes, but you claim that they are paid per death certificate and that the feds pays different values depending on what the death certificate shows. I think that it's time that you show any proof what so ever that this actually happens before we even can start to talk about covid specifically.
Please point out where I made any claim..?
Elsewhere in the thread someone wrote this:
Yes, yes they do!
Hospitals are the largest employers of doctors, as actual employee or 1099 employees, and doctors are pushed/encouraged/[favorite coercion term] to classified as much as possible as the novel coronavirus.
Federal $$$ goes to areas of higher covid deaths and cases. How do you think these entities get the Federal $$$? By misreporting/mis-classifying. After all, what's the harm in reporting death as due to covid when the patient has covid. It's the Andrew Cuomo Effect.
And somewhere else someone wrote this:
No. There was some legislation early on that allowed Medicare to pay more for COVID-19 cases than for other respiratory infections, because a much higher number of those patients were put on respirators, which is an expensive proposition.
There was never any "bonus" of Federal dollars for COVID deaths. In fact, if the patients died of COVID, hospitals often received less in Medicare payments.
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You claimed it here: "weren't COVID deaths worth more Federal dollars than non-COVID deaths?" And your quotes from other posters does not support your position, nor does they contain any form of evidence.
That's not a claim, it's a question.
Matter of fact, you forgot to quote the first couple of words: "Serious question -". So, please... calm down and be constructive. Should I pick on you for bad grammar, or shall we stick to the conversation and help each other out instead?
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Well, unfortunately it's a huge trend among especially anti-vaxxers and Qanons to begin their posts with "Serious question" so if I misinterpreted your intention there I'm truly sorry.
But to get back to the topic at hand. The reason why a question like yours is met with extreme skepticism is that for it to be true, then the Trump Administration who did everything that they could to hide Covid-19 under the rug would somehow simultaneously conspire with doctors (by giving them financial motivations) to have t
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Hospitals are the largest employers of doctors, as actual employee or 1099 employees, and doctors are pushed/encouraged/[favorite coercion term] to classified as much as possible as the novel coronavirus.
Federal $$$ goes to areas of higher covid deaths and cases. How do you think these entities get the Federal $$$? By misreporting/mis-classifying. After all, what's the harm in reporting death as due to covid when the patient has covid. It's the Andrew Cuomo Effect.
Re:Covid Deaths (Score:5, Interesting)
No. There was some legislation early on that allowed Medicare to pay more for COVID-19 cases than for other respiratory infections, because a much higher number of those patients were put on respirators, which is an expensive proposition.
There was never any "bonus" of Federal dollars for COVID deaths. In fact, if the patients died of COVID, hospitals often received less in Medicare payments.
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No. There was some legislation early on that allowed Medicare to pay more for COVID-19 cases than for other respiratory infections, because a much higher number of those patients were put on respirators, which is an expensive proposition.
There was never any "bonus" of Federal dollars for COVID deaths. In fact, if the patients died of COVID, hospitals often received less in Medicare payments.
Thank you. :-)
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You win the Prize today!
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I wouldn't be surprised if the increase in suicides caused by lock-down were falsely attributed to COVID deaths
In Virginia, if you die for any reason and you have a covid symptom, then it's counted as a covid death. So a bullet through the brain and a cough is covid.
As opposed to New York, where covid + nursing home = death by old age.
Re: Covid Deaths (Score:1)
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That's incredibly unlikely since most doctors don't want to be seen as performing assisted suicides.
FAKE NEWS (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:FAKE NEWS (Score:4, Interesting)
Lynnwood repeatedly told us more people would die from suicide due to lockdowns than from covid. I trust him.
On that topic I predicted a lower suicide rate during the lockdown at this time last year [slashdot.org] (in response to Lynnwood as it turns out):
We also don't know how the lock down affects affects suicide rates.
A lot of the depression associated with unemployment and loneliness comes from the fact that people feel aimless and are left out of social activities.
But with the lock down people doing nothing at home are doing exactly what they're supposed to do, and it doesn't matter if you're alone since there's no one is going to fun parties.
More importantly, it gives people a sort of common purpose. For instance, the World Wars caused years of hardship, yet suicide rates were lower during the wars than before or after.
The lock down might have a different effect (it's a lot more abstract that the wars), but I'd actually expect the suicide rates to be lower for the duration of the crisis.
Incidentally I also predicted that Trump would screw up the COVID-19 response causing a second stock market plunge, I guess I'd score that second prediction half-right.
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The lockdown has actually fueled tech innovation and adoption that makes it easier to stay connected from home. I've suspected since early last summer that the roll out of new tools and their mainstream acceptance would actually help many people who already felt isolated before COVID rejoin communities. I think many people who aren't comfortable in face-to-face situations are much more likely to be sociable when they can do so online, and there are a whole lot more people with whom they can now interact.
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