This comment is by wellokaythen on the post New Study: Male Suicide at All Time High.
wellokaythen said:
One factor, probably minor but still has to be examined, is that other demographic measurements are changing as well. Every cause of death is affected by the frequency of other causes of death. Demographics has some cold, bloody math to it, which is something too many people forget. You can’t really use statistics like this without taking a cold, hard look at the larger picture, because the math of death is merciless.
All the causes of death have to add up to 100% of deaths, and every person only gets one cause of death, so if one cause of death becomes less common, then other causes of death will become more common. Every time another cause of death becomes less common, then there are more people who could go on to commit suicide. I expect if we reduced every cause of death and made people immortal, suicide would be 100% of all deaths.
For example, the murder rate has been decreasing over the past few decades. Every man is going to die at some point, and fewer are dying from murder. Also, as a man gets older, his chance of being murdered goes down quite a bit. Perhaps some of these men who commit suicide are men who in earlier periods of their lives would have been murdered, killed on the job, or dead from diseases that are now treatable. Kill more men in other ways, and the suicide rate is bound to fall.
Photo credit: Flickr / Official U.S. Navy Imagery
Not to mention that the official mortality/morbidity categories may change from one generation to another. In the late 1950’s in the U.S., states started dropping “old age” as an official cause of death. Does that mean people started living forever? No, it just means “old age” has usually been replaced by the phrase “organ failure.” If you didn’t know that, you would think that in 1960 there was a sudden epidemic of organ failure on the scale of a million people annually. No, just a rearranged list.