The American Kamikaze Thread

[Magmar]

Suicide Rates by U.S. State

For those of you who never had to suffer through American History, the trend is that people who live in more rural, conservative states have a significantly higher suicide rate than those who live in more urbanized liberal states.

Do you think it's the incest? All the intolerance? Christian crusades against gays? Discuss.

[Jeff]

I think it's more related to population density. Living in a sparse state leads to loneliness, loneliness leads to depression, and depression leads to the Dark Side... err I mean suicide.

[Telume]

Way to not flub the explanation Yoda.

You know what could be another thing is that those areas have less resources and the work they tend to do is a lot more stressful, what with keeping up with payments. A lot of the people out there actually OWN their patches of land which I think is a lot more costly than owning a house.

[classy_cat18]

I think it's more related to population density. Living in a sparse state leads to loneliness, loneliness leads to depression, and depression leads to the Dark Side... err I mean suicide.

I think living in a dense city could be depressing too. More people doesn't exactly cure loneliness. Being surrounded by so many strangers and untrustworthy folk can really weigh on a person.

I think it's a lack of change. Same ol' same ol', day after day. Plus the fact that they're conservative states further cement that sameness.

[PancaKe]

Maybe it's just the percentage of population is higher because population is less than say New York. This is my thought stream:

Ohio - 5 out of 20 kill themselves; 25%
NY - 5 out of 50 kill themselves; 10%

So the number of people killling themselves is the same... I dont know, does it work like that?

[Heald]

The problem is the larger the number is, the less statistically significant the difference in population size matters in terms of measuring non-trivial differences between statistics. Considering as long as the sample size is above 25 and the population size is over 100, the results will be statistically robust, and the population sizes we're talking here are in the millions, there is no problem with different populations sizes.

Maybe living in the manufactured fear of socialism and black people in those states makes them prefer death to living in fear?

[PancaKe]

I heard its because the environments are so drastically different in country towns vs city towns in terms of who knows who. Like, if someone does something really socially bad in a city group, they can always just find a new unrelated set of friends. But in a country town, everyone would already know about it and it would change circumstances? Ah i hope that makes sense, I slept for 4 hours.

[Heald]

Except things that are socially bad in the city, such as rape, incest and bestiality, aren't seen that way in the country (or Alabama at least).

Do you know what's strange though? Suicide is a bigger killer than homicide. That's right, more people are killing themselves than killing each other. Either that or a lot of homicides are just being ruled suicides by lazy cops.