40,000 suicides annually, yet America simply shrugs

It is all over the world. A large number of men are commuting suicide, mostly students and then married men. Yet if you look through pop media all you will see is how many women are 'attempting' suicide... :/

> Each suicide costs society about $1 million in medical and lost-work expenses and emotionally victimizes an average of 10 other people.

So... the 10 other people emotionally victimized is an average figure, but the $1 million in medical costs isn't? How does finding a dead body rack up any medical expenses?

This is a very thoughtful article, which I see is part of a series from the same publication about suicide. There is good information here.

One paragraph jumped out at me: "Some states allow for court-ordered treatment plans. No studies have been done on whether this could prevent suicides, another example of gaps in knowledge, Caine says. Such ideas, he says, lie 'at the edge of what we know and what we don't know.'" Ugh, so even rather basic research on what might help hasn't been tried yet. We need to know more to do more.

The article also included some inspiring examples, including an Army officer who had come close to suicide himself about seven years ago during a combat deployment. "Today, he cannot recover from colon cancer diagnosed in 2012 that doctors declared terminal last year. In June, they said he had only months left. Faced with his own mortality, Fitch consulted his wife, Samantha Wolk, and reflected on the 22 veteran suicides occurring each day. He chose to devote his remaining time to prevent others from committing suicide.

"'I've always wanted to focus on trying to leave the world a better place,' he says."

Martin E. P. Seligman, in his book The Optimistic Child,[1] reviews some of the research current to about a decade ago about "self-esteem" programs in schools. They have long been known to be dangerous. The rising suicide rate compared to earlier birth cohorts in the United States suggests that young people in my generation and younger were not exposed in childhood to "optimism" as Seligman defines it but rather to "self-esteem" thinking, which doesn't leave people with enough inner strength to face a lot of challenges in life. Changing our thinking about what kind of thinking builds resilience in young people would help prevent suicide (and help everyone enjoy life better). There is already research on this, and we should apply it more.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Optimistic-Child-Depression-Resili...

One of the differences that jumps out at me about Lithuania and Greece is climate. I first learned about the importance of daylight for preventing depression (and thus suicide) from an Internet comment about twenty years ago when I wondered why Canada's rate of completed suicide is as high as it is, even though I would have guessed that its access to guns for young people might be a little less than in the United States. The answer, given to me by a Canadian scientist, is that Canada is nearer to the North Pole and farther from the Equator, and so it has a long winter season with little daylight.

In the old days, before United Nations statistics were on the World Wide Web, I actually went to a university library and looked up thick physical volumes of World Health Organisation statistics. The general relationship between polar latitude and high suicide rate, and equatorial latitude and lower suicide rate, holds up worldwide, with some exceptional-looking cases mostly explained by cloudiness. Low exposure to outdoor light is a suicide risk, and high exposure to cheery sunshine is a protective factor against suicide (but can lead to mania, known as "running amok" in some equatorial places). The author of the poem "Home on the Range" knew this: a place "Where seldom is heard a discouraging word / And the sky is not cloudy all day" like the Great Plains is protective against depression and suicide.

How much does the US spend on anti-terrorism activities[1] (which is, finger in the air, maybe 5000 people killed in 15 years?) compared to their mental health system (6500 people dead every -two months-)?

[1] It's about $40bn. http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/factsheet_department_homeland/