About 49,500 people took their own lives last year in the U.S., the highest number ever, according to new government data posted Thursday.
I will probably get shit for this, since it’s a predominantly left leaning space, but until society starts acknowledging men’s issues it will keep getting worse.
https://afsp.org/suicide-statistics
In 2021, men died by suicide 3.90x more than women.
In 2021, firearms accounted for 54.64% of all suicide deaths.
This article is an excellent example of what I am talking about. It does not even mention the disparity of suicide rates between the sexes despite it obviously being a huge outlier. Instead, they talk about how guns are the problem, even though a gun is just a method.
Taking away the easy methods to commit suicide might reduce the rate, but it does nothing to address to core issues that make people want to kill themselves in the first place. Instead of 5000 dead people you will have 5000 people who wish they were dead. Mission accomplished.
but until society starts acknowledging men’s issues it will keep getting worse.
Good news. We’ve moved on from ‘man hating’ on the left. Intersectional Feminism actually espouses the fact that men are also harmed by the patriarchy and all the ridiculous demands that it puts on us, like not feeling feelings. You should look into it.
Expecting women to help men is like expecting men to give women the right to vote suddenly on their own initiative.
If you’re essentializing the left you’re stuck in meaningless ideology. “Kill All Men” is a good T-shirt and let’s not pretend women shouldn’t look out for women. Intersectional Feminism might have good ad copy but expecting an ideology to cure all problems is a broken (and male-oriented) way of viewing the world.
“If we just get the ideology right the hard work will disappear!” No, men are still going to have to help other men and “Intersectional Feminism” is still going to be either 1) a way to a more nuanced feminism (a good thing for those feminists to develop, don’t get me wrong), or 2) an Extremely Online project of no real consequence.
Why do you think men aren’t participating in feminism? We’re men helping men over here.
The struggle isn’t men vs women. It’s different mindsets. There are men, women, and other identities who view things in an us vs them bigoted way and then there are those who don’t look at what someone is, but how they treat others. The latter tend to be capable of getting along just fine together and use communication skills and emotional maturity to create solidarity with each other rather than pointing fingers at each other and creating absolutist rules and narratives. They show what is possible and are creating change and progress through being the solution of unity and solidarity by simply being cool with each other and not assuming anything about each other based on whatever identities they have.
Free mental healthcare is a pretty leftist stance I think? Solving social issues and getting people the resources and care they need seems like a good way to solve the suicide issue and that’s 100% what the left is all about.
Free mental healthcare is a pretty leftist stance I think?
Yes, pro universal healthcare and also pro 2A, liberals not so much.
Hmmm, idk, as a liberal I’m a fan of a well regulated militia.
Not so much a fan of my serial abuser father and his gun collection. His father killed himself a few years ago, that greatly increases his chances of suicide, and his type is likely to go out “in a blaze of glory”.
I’m all for universal health care, but his court required therapy was “just government indoctrination”, you can’t help everyone, but you can regulate their ability to hurt others.
But I guess that makes me anti 2a, either with you or against you right?
Free mental healthcare is a great idea, but it will only partially solve the problem. Men tend to use mental healthcare way less than women. Where I live (where it’s basically free) there are some efforts to get men into programs, like support groups specifically for men, but these don’t change the situation much. There needs to be a cultural change as well, aside from societal improvements to better everybody’s lives.
I will probably get shit for this, since it’s a predominantly left leaning space, but until society starts acknowledging men’s issues it will keep getting worse.
???
What left leaning circles have you been in? I think we all know men have issues too?
In my left leaning circles it’s pretty well understood that feminism is about helping women. And that’s a good thing. Trying to make feminism an ideology which serves all genders is problematic because it implies an omniscient perspective counter to proper intersectionality. Men experience oppression but only men can represent their oppression in discourse.
Women can’t and shouldn’t feel like they can have an opinion on men’s issues. “Stay in your lane” comes to mind.
How far do you take this perspective? As a lefty that doesn’t sound like a very leftist take, rather it sort of completely eschews the principles of solidarity and reason-based argumentation…
I do agree that feminism is about helping women (and that’s great!), but should mothers not advocate for better mental health resources for their sons? Should I not advocate for better access to birth control for the women in my life because I’m male or for Ukrainian liberty because I’m not Ukrainian? Denying someone access to public discourse about a topic because they’re not suffering the consequences of the topic seems a bit silly to me. And of course, men do actually suffer under patriarchy, albeit in a different way than women obviously.
I think you can help people and stand up for people being hurt regardless of what you got in your pants. Yes, education and personal experience may allow you to do a better job at it clearly a medical professsional can solve problems that I cant for example, but most of the time I think basic empathy can get you pretty far.
A homeless woman this week asked me for water, I gave her a bottle of water. I don’t think I need to be a women or ten courses of feminism to know that humans need water to survive.
It also does not even mention the disparity of suicide stats between different ethnic groups.
US demographics use “race” instead of ethnicity but the stats still point to a massive disparity with American Indian or Alaska Natives having suicide rates in the 20s (compared to overall rates of around 14 -14.9 per 100,000). Black and Hispanic people also have higher suicide rates.
It’s worth noting that also according to that article women attempt suicide 1.3x as often as men – but men are more likely to use guns so they end up dying more. It seems to me guns are a core part of the issue
So let’s pretend we get rid of guns; now we have thousands of people that still wish they were dead. Some will find other ways to die.
That’s the point the other poster was making. We gotta treat the core problems, not just the symptoms.
The issue isn’t that people are committing suicide with firearms, or even that they’re committing suicide. The issue is that people are miserable and hate their lives.
Technology has us more isolated from each other and people have less friends now than they did 20 years ago.
The only reason a “left leaning” space would argue with you over that is when you start blaming women or feminism for mens issues.
As a man who is suicidal pretty much constantly, I know my issues are my own. I’ve failed, not society, but I also know that 5000 people who wish they were dead aren’t dead yet and so there’s still a chance things can change. I’d say gun control can be part of the solution, but I do also agree that we should be discussing what makes people suicidal and especially seeing why one segment of a population feels it more than others.
For me personally, I just feel like a complete failure in all aspects of life and can’t find any direction that I care to pursue to get me “on track.” I’m also such a mixed bag of 1000 different “types” that I have something for everyone to dislike as far as finding a partner. I would never blame women for wanting what they want, so while I enjoy my interests and stand firm in not wanted to live with a dog, I just have to accept that I’m not anyone’s cup of tea.
So tldr on that bit, I’m the problem, not society.
You exist, and you are who you are, and that is ok. You may believe that you have failed, and feel guilty or ashamed of that, and that’s ok too. You sound lonely, rejected, and really hurt by your experiences, “something for everyone to dislike”. These feelings suck, but internalizing them and telling yourself that you are a problem can be really unhelpful. You are worthy of acceptance, with what flaws you see in yourself. This isn’t really a great forum for personal, intimate discussion, but I do hope you can talk about your experiences with someone you trust.
Hey man, you don’t have to hold the world up by itself. Not everything is your responsibility. In fact a lot of what people are saying here that are causing these spikes are a result of isolation and society failing our people. All out individualism isn’t that great for people. We need interdependence because we can’t do this all alone. We need that sense of community that has all but been demolished. It’s good that you aren’t blaming others for your problems, but also, society could be more helpful/beneficial to you instead of kicking you to the curb instead of making everything seem hopeless. It could provide you the tools to climb out instead of leaving you in the well.
All this to say, is that please don’t be ashamed to ask for help. None of us would’ve gotten this far without help from others.
One aspect you might have to separate is the gun control advocates who just want to cite another reason for X or Y policies. Those people aren’t necessarily advocating for mental health.
As an example take waiting periods. They might do something for first time buyers but the policy doesn’t really make sense for the people who already have a safe full of guns to pick from. I don’t hear those people talk about programs like “hold my guns” either.
Well, since gun control in this country is basically verboten, one of the simplest ways to reduce suicide is a non-starter.
I know you mean well but you’re like the person who makes suicidal tendencies more powerful because you want to shut all the windows in a burning building because you personally find falling bodies less aesthetically pleasing than burning ones.
As someone who thinks that people should have the right to end their life, I still think guns might be an issue because they can make it very quick and allow no time to think it through. Even some of the other accessible methods take some preparation, and each step is a chance to think again.
No one talks about why women go through with suicide less, either. One of the reasons can very likely be that more women are the caregiver of their parents or children since the bigger number of men who commit suicide stems from the amount of men who are lonely but who also do not have to care for other people.
until society starts acknowledging men’s issues
I wonder what gives you the impression that society doesn’t acknowledge men’s issues?
I agree with you in the sense much left leaning conversation tends to tribalize to specific groups. Im super left leaning but I want things that benefit everyone. universal healthcare, universal education, publicization of anything that is to essential or without robust enough competition to be run by the market, citizens income. Gun control as a local issue (you can’t bring guns into my house, you can’t bring guns into my business, you can’t bring guns into our town, you can’t bring guns into our state) and federal (limitations on capability especially rate of fire, clip size, electronic assist). Legalization of suicide along with all other bodily autonomy. I find both sides like to look at things as this group or that group but I want general things myself.
I find it interesting how much western countries have individualised the causes of sadness.
It’s not that strange that people are often sick in a sick society. If you’re depressed, it’s likely that there are things that are causing or exacerbating that depression.
Give people homes, job security, less stressful jobs, and offer them a healthy work-life balance? Far easier to deal with and possibly even heal from trauma or serious health issues.
But that costs money. Selling people pills and self-help books? That makes money.
But that costs money.
It’s worth noting that a lot of solutions actually save money.
For example, universal healthcare is a big issue in the US. Around 2/3 of all bankruptcies are from medical debt. People ration lifesaving medication like insulin because of how prohibitively expensive it is. GoFundMe is of the largest healthcare providers in the country, and over 1/3 of all campaigns are for medical expenses.
They’ve created a system where it’s prohibitively expensive to seek necessary medical care, and is built on the foundational acceptance that people need to die and suffer for it to function as intended.
Yet a universal healthcare system is projected to cost the US an estimated ~13% less than they are paying.
Save taxpayers money, not the super rich. The system is working as intended for the parasites at the top.
Sort of. If they all worked together they would have been better off, even for their own class. Working together and further monopolizing businesses for American industries would have made them much richer (probably at the expense or other economies, but I guess we’re just talking about “the west” so thats slightly irrelevant). Every other American would be better off too, but that might mean Elon Musk is worth 100 B instead of 180B and Larry Ellison is only worth 70B. But there would be a lot more Billionaires and a heck of a lot more millionaires. But that isn’t how game theory works I guess, and that would be boring for them… they have no national allegiances anyway.
Around 2/3 of all bankruptcies are from medical debt
A bit misleading, though I get your point. 2/3 of people who file for bankruptcy have medical debt, not that the medical debt was the cause of the bankruptcy. Any dollar amount of medical debt factors into this statistic, so if I have $800 in medical debt with reasonable payments and I drown under a mortgage I can no longer afford and 20k in credit card debt, did the medical debt cause the bankruptcy? Of course not. It’s counted anyways.
A bit misleading, though I get your point. 2/3 of people who file for bankruptcy have medical debt, not that the medical debt was the cause of the bankruptcy.
Your assessment of this is incorrect.
The study I was referencing reports on people who specify that medical-related financial stress contributed directly to their bankruptcy. This was broken down by medical expenses and medical issues leading to loss of income - with medical expenses being the higher percentage at ~60%, and the combined percentage sitting between 65-70% (with overlap in responses).
But that costs money. Selling people pills and self-help books? That makes money.
I am sorry but this is a ridiculous implication.
The vast majority of prescribed antidepressants (I’m assuming this is what you mean by pills) are old drugs with long expired patents, which makes them quite cheap. The profit margins have to be pretty low due to competition from generic formulation manufacturers. This is an area that actually could use more investment into R&D.
Self-help books are usually written by individual authors or small collaborations. It’s profitable but not massive industry. The people profiting from self-help books are not anywhere near to being able to influence people getting homes, job security and work-life balance in either direction.
Many cultures have issues with depression or suicide. Including ones with a focus on collectivism.
Work-life balance could be a part of the issue. That can be an issue for individualism or collectism. Although I feel like with individualism it’s easier to set your own standard.
The affordability of life is a problem as well but money being a thing won’t go away anytime soon.
Everytime I see suicide statistics like these. I don’t think of the deaths. I think of the misery each individual must have experienced in order to come to the conclusion that death was better.
Then I think about the nebulous political cloud surrounding these people and those who may have approached the conclusion but had the strength to carry on. I say nebulous because research is never going to encapsulate the reasons for one to kill oneself. If 50k in the US is the number who followed through, the numbers must be huge. I say this, because the suicide death statistic, is only the start of the problem - it’s a scale.
Misery festers at all of us. Labels, drugs and conversation can help, but it’s just burying the problem for it to resurface later. Until we start getting political movements towards human needs, this will continue.
I think of the misery each individual must have experienced in order to come to the conclusion that death was better.
That someone not only have decided that death is better, but also have gone through all the steps to act on it is a measure of their resolve, if anything. And as you’ve said, they’re still a rarity. On the spectrum of entertaining occasional thoughts to taking steps to actually doing it, the further you go, the less common it is!
That a lot of people have already gone this far, just how many more are mulling about it, questioning whether or not life is worth it, whether or not to do anything about it? And this “it gets better” mantra keeps some people from even speaking up! Why speak up when you’re just going to be slapped with a thought-terminating-cliché? It makes it harder to know how many people are miserable enough to entertain “bad thoughts”, and that the only objective measure we’d have is the number of people who’ve gone to the very end.
Honestly the number of people I’ve seen who are just living on the thought of “if I didn’t wake up tomorrow, that would be fine, except my mom might be sad”. And I mean seriously, not just the type of people who upvote posts of r/me_irl
Indeed. A quick check on the available studies on suicidal ideation (worldwide) led me to this study, which I can’t vouch for, but still gives me an indication that it’s not just our bubbles that’s led us to thinking it’s prevalent.
To quote its abstract:
The prevalence of SI (suicidal ideation) ranged across regions from 14.3% to 22.6%; the prevalence of SA (suicide attempts) ranged from 4.6% to 15.8%. Year was not associated with increasing STB (suicidal thoughts and behaviors) prevalence except for studies from the United States, which showed increasing rates of SI and SA since 2007.
Taking these figures at face value, around one out of five people worldwide have thoughts of suicide. Or by cobbling together estimates of world population aged under 25y/o and multiplying by 17% (harmonic mean of 14.3% and 22.6% to two sig figs), that’s roughly 550 million people. More than the US population, according to Wolfram Alpha.
Of course, that’s just very rough data, but still quite sobering if you ask me.
I recently came to the realization that staying alive to prevent my share of an inheritance from going to the greedy bitch who married my father late-in-life is a reason to stay alive. That’s fucking sad as fuck.
Don’t get me wrong. I love my life. But when something so dark and grim can be phrased as a positive, things are really wrong.
I believe it. This place sucks. Criminals and assholes everywhere, at least in my life. People claw at you and fuck you over until your suicidal. I have no respect for America at all anymore. It feels like having to live with seeing your rapist everyday.
That and nobody cares. I sent out goodbye texts to a lot of people in my life. Literally no one cares. I’ve had people try to push me to suicide, stalk me, and give me death threats since 2020. Cops don’t care.
Ok first of all I get you, as someone from Europe, the greatest strengths of America often sound like the biggest weaknesses to me.
And then ofc if you wanna talk about it I’m here and I will listen :) hope you’re doing good.
American culture was deeply scarred by the cold war in ways that I don’t think many people realize. Over the last 80 years, the pursuit of self-interest has come to dominate every aspect of life and in turn degrades any attempt at community or helping one another. It’s quite sad actually. The America that gave my grandparents the opportunity to drag themselves out of poverty has turned around and eaten itself alive.
Yep. Extreme egoism is great if you’re a winner, but horrible if you’re not. And most people are not winning.
I would argue it’s not even good even if you are winning.
Even if you strike gold and get rich, what use is all of it if you’re alone?
Literally can’t talk about because I get death threats because I made some bad people mad. And I know what they are capable of.
All my social media is watched by them.
Edit: I always get down votes for my real life experience posts. The world is fucked, you just shut out anything that goes against the privilege you were born into. Life is death war and chaos. You can either live for humanity or continue making rich criminals richer while you deny reality. I’ve seen people get other people murdered by cops on purpose. It’s real. This is America… There is zero hope.
Excessive doomerism isn’t popular among those that don’t share your experiences
I’m sorry maybe I’m a little triggered because this hits close to home, but seriously how the fuck can people claim “oh suicide is going up because guns”
Are they fucking blind to how things are going in the world? I’m so fucking livid right now. “Suicide is because guns” fuck off
Guns don’t cause suicide, but they make it much easier to successfully complete suicide
Handguns especially
But I doubt an increase in suicides this year from last year has anything to do with gun ownership rates
I made a serious attempt once. I am anti-gun and didn’t have access to one. I tried a different way. If someone is serious, they will find a way. (I’m doing much better, thanks)
If you would have tired with a gun you would have succeeded. That’s the point about guns and their availability.
Some people are hell bent on taking any step possible to prevent suicide besides being there for their friends. The answer to the suicide problem shouldn’t be suicide nets. The problem isn’t the means it’s the motivation.
Suicide number decreased when we switched the type of gas ovens used. Use to be that you could stuff up your windows and doors, turn on the oven, and slowly drift to sleep into death. Now you will just be slightly warmer. Of course, that is a supply side solution. And just like the republican war on drugs, supply side solutions never get rid of the underlying problem.
