Completely tangental: Higher air pressure makes me feel happier.
Positive association between altitude and suicide in U.S. counties
71–80 of 211 posts
Re: Positive association between altitude and suicide in U.S. counties
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
If we did science as you seem to think it should be done then very little progress will be made. You should read up on the history of progress in neuroscience. Metaphorically speaking; when you walk into a dark room one has to reach out and try to make sense of things before stumbling upon where the lamp is.
You may want to consider, how much that bogus science has set us back. How long have we removed tonsils, ate the food pyramid into Type 2 Diabetes, measured people's skulls for criminality, and convicted people on the results of polygraph tests?
Bogus science can move us forward, but also backwards.
Re: Positive association between altitude and suicide in U.S. counties
#73It'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…
Also includes people that are/were alcoholics and so _now_ don't drink.
Re: Positive association between altitude and suicide in U.S. counties
#74TL;DR – brain needs oxygen
It is not about oxygen, it is about catecholamine depletion via a decrease in BH4
Re: Positive association between altitude and suicide in U.S. counties
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
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%2F…
As someone else said, it's the inequality that matters. People don't die by suicide from being poor, they do it because of the low self-esteem poverty causes when you're around many people doing better than you. Many very poor countries have suicide rates much lower than the US.
Mountain towns have about the biggest class dichotomy that I've seen anywhere between the wealthy and the "help." Unlike many other places, they're all in close proximity.
Re: Positive association between altitude and suicide in U.S. counties
#76Altitude as a proxy for isolation, perhaps
It is so frustrating that people have such a hard time that our mood can be effected by anything other than emotional inputs.
It has nothing to do with isolation, it has to to how living in a place that does not match our genetics effects us as biologically animals.
This effect is revealing the fact that people ho were genetically adapted to live ate low altitudes should not live at high altitudes.
Re: Positive association between altitude and suicide in U.S. counties
#77I haven't dug into their controls, but it seems to me that higher altitude may be associated with remoteness.
Are Denver and SLC considered remote? My own city is about at sea level, but by car the next closest cities are 3 hours to the north, 6 hours to the east, and 9 hours to the south. I’d say we are more remote, despite being at a much lower elevation.
Re: Positive association between altitude and suicide in U.S. counties
#78I recall seeing this article from 2014 referring to suicides in Utah ('utah paradox') and how neuroscientist Perry Renshaw was trying to link it to altitude: http://mic.com/articles/104096/there-s-a-suicide-epidemic-in... which links to another study from 2011: http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/abs/10.1176/appi.ajp.201... "Together, the stray statistics and stories about life out west tipped off Renshaw to a common…
This aligns with my similar theory (lack of O2 leads to depression) that was born from observations of yoga, meditation and walking all forced people to breath more air through breath work, exercises or going outside, lead to better mental health outcomes.
I am going to assume that in urban vs rural areas that is a similar effect from air pollution.
But all my doctors have been inclined to give me pills for depression, and aren't interesting in exploring the relationship with O2.
Re: Positive association between altitude and suicide in U.S. counties
#79I 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?
The percentage of time spent at home would vary too much from person to person anyway, whereas percentage of time spent in the county of one's home is much more homogenous.
Re: Positive association between altitude and suicide in U.S. counties
#80They don't mention about temperature. Is it controlled for? Winter months are know to be "sadder" than summer months.
I'd expect that difference to be driven by sunlight amount rather than by temperature. Cold is easier to deal with than dark and gloomy when I go to work and dark and gloomy when I come home.
I'm curious if they controlled for sunlight then. I'm in a mountainous area and many areas (like where my house is) have mountains blocking sunlight for multiple hours in a day. Couple that with being in a wooded area and even some summer days can feel dark and gloomy. But in my case, being surrounded by nature far outweighs the lack of light in terms of depression.