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Positive association between altitude and suicide in U.S. counties

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

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Re: Positive association between altitude and suicide in U.S. counties

#51

Post by nabla9 »

vasco wrote: post #35

It'd be funny if it turned out to be that somehow it's safer to live at higher altitude meaning suicides rates would be proportionally higher since you die less of other things. It's something I've mused about in the past, if you extend technological advances long enough into the future, suicide rates would go up because there'd be less other things to die from due to advances in medicine and so on.

Suicide is not like cancer vs. heart disease where one replaces another. Older people do slightly less suicides.

Suicide rates are up in absolute sense.

Re: Positive association between altitude and suicide in U.S. counties

#52

Post by gonzo41 »

vasco wrote: post #35

It'd be funny if it turned out to be that somehow it's safer to live at higher altitude meaning suicides rates would be proportionally higher since you die less of other things. It's something I've mused about in the past, if you extend technological advances long enough into the future, suicide rates would go up because there'd be less other things to die from due to advances in medicine and so on.

Eh it's all just Lies and Statistics. It's like how 'non drinkers' die earlier than those who lightly drink. But no one who reports it writes the next sentence to explain that, non drinkers include people who don't drink to manage chronic health conditions and thus skew things with their ill health making it seem like alcohol is required to be healthy.

I suspect in the future death by choice, in a palliative setting may go up. Though with the current waves of deregulation, maybe we're headed for more industrial accidents.

But as for the article. Places that are high up, are cold and isolated and people are social beings.

Re: Positive association between altitude and suicide in U.S. counties

#54

Post by iraqmtpizza »

andsoitis wrote: post #23
iraqmtpizza wrote: post #15

[flagged]

From the article: Similar findings were observed for both firearm-related suicides (59% of suicides) and nonfirearm-related suicides.

They literally corrected for whiteness. So we don't even know what the actual rate would be. Also, studying firearm and nonfirearm separately just screams bias. Why not pharmaceutical vs nonpharmaceutical?

Re: Positive association between altitude and suicide in U.S. counties

#55

Post by evancox100 »

nonameiguess wrote: post #45

The figure 1 makes it look like an awful lot like there is no pattern at all for the vast majority of counties, and then the few with the very highest suicide rates are all very high altitude. They also mention this, but I'm not sure country is a great way to measure this. Death Valley and Mt Whitney, the lowest and highest altitude points in the contiguous states, are in the same county. Might also want to remove Ve…

The appearance of figure 1 is due to the majority of counties being at / near sea level. Suppose we take as true that there is a direct link between altitude and some other phenomenon, for example rates of altitude sickness. If 90% of the counties are near sea level, with some variation, you would only see increased altitude sickness in the 10% highest counties. The graph would look similar to what you see here.

Re: Positive association between altitude and suicide in U.S. counties

#56

Post by cykotic »

lm28469 wrote: post #30
user_7832 wrote: post #13

From the abstract: > Controlling for percent of age >50 yr, percent male, percent white, median household income, and population density of each county, the higher-altitude counties had significantly higher suicide rates than the lower-altitude counties. Similar findings were observed for both firearm-related suicides (59% of suicides) and nonfirearm-related suicides. So (median) income has been considered, in case a…

Which is dumb, what matters is the income of the person who commits suicide, not the median income of their county

Higher median income places tend to have a fewer percentage of poor people. Probably some people assume poverty correlates to suicide rate. The authors did the best they could at making sense of the data they had.

Here’s a map of suicide rate in Italy. Note the north has higher rate of suicide than the south. The north of Italy is much richer than the south.

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Ff...

Re: Positive association between altitude and suicide in U.S. counties

#57

Post by lm28469 »

cykotic wrote: post #49
lm28469 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Harder than publishing bogus studies for sure

We live in a world of imperfect knowledge. We look for patterns to try to determine cause/effect. The beginning process for this is to point out correlations and then further investigate. It’s not possible to account for all variables when it comes to things like suicide. It is possible and worthwhile to try to study the phenomenon as best we can.

These thing end up on wikipedia and in dubious news sites as "Suicide is caused by high altitude", so yes it does matter a lot actually.

It's poor science at best, if you can't control variables then the whole thing is next to useless, which happens a lot these days. At the end you have correlations, not causations

Re: Positive association between altitude and suicide in U.S. counties

#58

Post by brigadier132 »

mrosett wrote: post #53
brigadier132 wrote: post #31

What's the correlation between altitude and the amount of sunlight in a day?

In the US, I would assume generally positive. The mountain west gets more sun than the northeast or northwest.

I would assume that higher altitudes would have more intense winters that then result in people staying indoors and isolated for longer periods of time?

I would guess that altitude and longitude are not correlated globally (at least I don't know why they would be) but in the US I generally associate altitude with snow.

Re: Positive association between altitude and suicide in U.S. counties

#59

Post by iraqmtpizza »

whimsicalism wrote: post #29
iraqmtpizza wrote: post #15

[flagged]

Well it is a good thing you don't have your name on this comment.

Good thing I didn't waste six months of my life writing a paper about "what if mountainous areas and lowland areas were equally white, how would the firearm suicide rates compare? we'll throw in some laughable speculation about sleep apnea and mood disturbances to spice it up"

also, why isn't the headline "low altitude people more likely to die"

Re: Positive association between altitude and suicide in U.S. counties

#60

Post by rmellow »

danesparza wrote: post #19

I don't want to come of as flippant, but I'm genuinely curious: Is there a correlation to how many stories the person's residence has as well? If they live on a 3rd story of an apartment, is there a higher suicide rate than the first floor of an apartment?

Surely the rate of successful defenestration is lower at the 3rd vs the 13th floor.
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