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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

#81

Post by cykotic »

foxyv wrote: post #72
cykotic wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

On the whole though you would agree progress has been made, right? In a world with imperfect knowledge you do the best you can with the information you have.

The response to a paper ought not be, “This paper is bogus because they didn’t control for all variables.”. If the paper is bogus then give reasons for why this is the case. Was the statistical analysis wrong? Are there reasons why this can’t be true? Is this new information worthy of further investigation?

It’s sloppy thinking to say it’s a bad paper without having studied the issue and the data.

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

#82

Post by cykotic »

mjhay wrote: post #75
cykotic wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

That is certainly plausible and worth looking into.

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

#83

Post by frogger8 »

I live in Utah and left the LDS / Mormon church in May. I am dating woman that, like most modern American woman, are open to having sex before marriage. It’s not polite to kiss and tell but turns out being touched starved IMHO is a really shi77y way to live.

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

#84

Post by bannedbybros »

seltzered_ wrote: post #12

I 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…

Too bad that the chemical theory of depression is pseudo-science.

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

#85

Post by itsoktocry »

gonzo41 wrote: post #52
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…

>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.

Can you point to the study that makes this claim without controlling for other health issues? Otherwise, you're just making stuff up, which is worse than what you accuse the scientists of.

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

#86

Post by itsoktocry »

joncrocks wrote: post #73
gonzo41 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Also includes people that are/were alcoholics and so _now_ don't drink.

Does it? Can you link to the study?

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

#87

Post by imperio59 »

seltzered_ wrote: post #12

I 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…

Except that whole chemical imbalance theory was thoroughly debunked earlier this year as not being the cause of depression, just a marketing gimmick used to sell more anti depressants by pharma companies...

"The serotonin theory of depression has been one of the most influential and extensively researched biological theories of the origins of depression. Our study shows that this view is not supported by scientific evidence. It also calls into question the basis for the use of antidepressants."

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2022/jul/analysis-depression-prob...

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

#88

Post by joadha »

the_economist wrote: post #24

High altitude is also associated with longevity, reduced heart disease, and more efficient mitochondria.

Yeah, and that made me wonder whether survivorship bias could be at play. That is, populations at lower elevations see less opportunities for suicide due to individuals dying of things like heart disease, etc., before they have a chance to off themselves at a later age.

But they do mention that they "[controlled] for percent of age >50 yr." Does that imply that, per county, they excluded high-elevation suicides that wouldn't have happened at lower elevations, using known mortality rates for common causes-of-death for age > 50 individuals?

I'm sure the answer is in the paper somewhere, but I need to get back to work. :-)

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