Inductivist

From PLOS ONE:

Introduction
Suicide is a major public health concern and a leading cause of death around the world. How religion influences the risk of completed suicide in different settings across the world requires clarification in order to best inform suicide prevention strategies.

Methods
A meta-analysis using search results from Pubmed and Web of Science databases was conducted following PRISMA protocol and using the keywords “religion” or “religious” or “religiosity” or “spiritual” or “spirituality” plus “suicide” or “suicidality” or “suicide attempt”. Random and fixed effects models were used to generate pooled ORs and I2 values. Sub-analyses were conducted among the following categories: young age (under 45yo), older age (45 or older), western culture, eastern culture, and religious homogeneity.

Results
Nine studies that altogether evaluated 2339 suicide cases and 5252 comparison participants met all selection criteria and were included in the meta-analysis. The meta-analysis suggested an overall protective effect of religiosity from completed suicide with a pooled OR of 0.38 (95% CI: 0.21–0.71) and I2 of 91%. Sub-analyses similarly revealed significant protective effects for studies performed in western cultures (OR = 0.29, 95% CI: 0.18–0.46), areas with religious homogeneity (OR = 0.18, 95% CI: 0.13–0.26), and among older populations (OR = 0.42, 95% CI: 0.21–0.84). High heterogeneity of our meta-analysis was attributed to three studies in which the methods varied from the other six.

Conclusion
Religion plays a protective role against suicide in a majority of settings where suicide research is conducted. However, this effect varies based on the cultural and religious context. Therefore, public health professionals need to strongly consider the current social and religious atmosphere of a given population when designing suicide prevention strategies.

In this new study of over 120,000 suicides, the authors reported that 0.5% of the suicides were LGBT.  They also cited an estimate that 4.1% of Americans are sexual minorities. This suggests that they have a much lower rate of suicide than heterosexuals.

The authors speculate that sexual minority status of many suicides go unknown and unrecorded. If LGBT's had the same suicide rate as heteros, only 12% of them had their sexual orientation recorded correctly. I find this hard to believe.

It is safe to say that, according to this data, sexual minorities, like blacks, have a low rate of suicide. How is that possible, in a country that is supposedly so homophobic, supposedly so hateful?  The answer is that America is not a hate-filled country. It's an impressively tolerant country.

The rise in teen suicide since 2007 was recently documented at Chateau Heartiste (CH). The increase was attributed to the humiliations of social media and the alienation of a diversifying country.

CH wanted to see a longer trend broken out by race, so I used CDC data to calculate rates for white teens going back to 1968. Trends had to be broken into periods. Here's the first from 1968-1978:























The rate rose and peaked in 1977 at over 9 suicides per 100k white teens ages 15-19. The next graph covers 1979-1998:























White teen suicides continued to climb and peaked in 1988 at 12 per 100k, then returning to 9 thereafter.  From 1999-2016:






















The rate fell below 9 and bottomed out at 7 in 2007. Since then it has risen to almost 12, which matches the 1988 peak.

I doubt there are only a couple factors to explain these trends. Your ideas are appreciated. Drug use among teens was on the increase in the 70s, and it peaked around 1978. But it fell in the 80s while suicide kept climbing. Then it became to climb again around '93 and has basically plateaued  since the late 90s. Alcohol use has declined from the 70s to the present day, so drugs and alcohol don't seem to explain it.

I was working in a psychiatric unit in the late 80s, and many of the teens were Goth types. All the "rapid onset" teen transgenders were hearing about reminds us how important social contagion is for adolescents.

Gun availability doesn't explain it: While the number of guns per gun-holding household has risen over the past few decades, you don't need 10 guns to kill yourself. You just need one. The percentage of homes with any guns has drifted down.

I don't know enough about trends in treatment and prescription drugs to know if they explain the trends.

Divorce was on the rise in the 70s, but I don't know why suicide would fall during the 90s if family is so important.  Friends are obviously important to teens, and social media certainly seems important over the last decade, but I don't know what what going on to drive trends from the 70s to the 90s. Ideas?

By the way, over the entire period black teen suicide rate was much lower than for whites. Half as much. Like whites, rates rise in the 70s and 80s and peak later in 1994, then they fall but have jumped again in the last couple years, perhaps due to social media.

UPDATE: If we ignore the ups and downs, the big picture is that the white teen suicide rate in the late 60s was around 5 and by the late 70s and since it has been very roughly twice that rate. So something has happened to kids' lives over the past 45 years. HC talks about diversity. The country is certainly more diverse. Families are definitely messier than they used to be. Changes in treatment seem to have made things worse, not better. Social media facilitates humiliation.

One interesting change is sex. More teens have sex now than in the 60s, and liberationists tell us more sex means happier people. It actually seems to be making teens more miserable.  

Observe my skills as I handle the progressive concepts of "white male privilege"  and "intersectional theory" at the same time.

On the subject of suicide, these ideas imply that whites and men should suffer lower rates, and white men especially so.  America society, with its bone crushing oppression of minority women, we should see particularly high suicide rates among black women.

I constructed a graph from 2000-2016 on all US suicides (CDC data), breaking the rates out by race and gender:


Intersectional theory insists we focus on combinations of status in order to see how oppression is multiplied. It certainly is: white men kill themselves at more than 10 times the rate of black women. More generally, white suicide is more common than in any minority group.

Seriously, how do we explain the huge black-white gap? My guess is genetically-based personality. When one experiences frustrations, whites are more likely to look inside and perceive inadequacies. Blacks are more inclined to blame others, and if one feels like pointing a gun, it gets pointed at another, not at oneself.  Liberal Americans then make the situation worse by encouraging black other-blaming.

So why the gender difference? Are men more self-blaming?  No, women are, and they actually attempt suicide more than men, but the one thing men are good at is getting the job done, by whatever means necessary.

Here are a number of additional cross-national correlations that are supportive of a socially conservative orientation (the church data is from here and the divorce data from here):


Pearson Correlations

Alcohol consumption--crude divorce rate .61 (strong relationship)
Crude divorce rate--suicide rate .49 (medium)
Weekly church attendance--alcohol consumption -.40 (medium)
Weely church attendance--suicide -.42 (medium)
Weekly church attendance--crude divorce rate -.34 (medium)

Using WHO data, I calculated the cross-national correlation between annual alcohol consumption and suicide rates. For 101 countries, it is .58--a strong assocation. Countries with high levels of consumption have much more suicide. Eastern Europe illustrates this well. The average person there drinks roughly 15 liters of (pure) alcohol per year, and suicide rates are two or three times the average.

Such a finding supports the socially conservative view that drinking immoderately (or at all) needs to be discouraged.

These graphs show 1999-2009 suicide trends for U.S. men (top) and women (bottom) separately (CDC) :






































Both sexes ages 45-64 show large increases over the past decade.

The graph below shows 1999-2009 suicide rates by age group (CDC data):

Rates (not shown) are stable for children, adolescents, and younger adults, but suicides have been increasing for middle-aged people. By contrast, they have been dropping among those 75 and over.

The high rate of suicide this time of year got me wondering if religious involvement lowers one's risk, so I looked for a study (Taliaferro, L., Rienzo, B., Pigg, R., Miller, M., & Dodd, V. (2009). Spiritual Well-Being and Suicidal Ideation Among College Students. Journal of American College Health, 58(1), 83-90.).

The above table lists the correlations from a study of 522 college students. I don't know why their measure of religiosity is not included here, but you can see that all three types of well-being--spiritual, religious, and existential--are negatively associated with feeling depressed, hopeless, and suicidal. ("Spiritual well-being" is simply the summed scores of religious and existential well-being.) Religious well-being measures satisfaction with one's relationship with God, while existential well-being concerns satisfaction with life and finding meaning and purpose in it.


(Let me add that all these questions about various dimensions of satisfaction are probably tapping, in part, personality traits. It goes without saying that Standard Social Science Models (SSSM) like this one are misspecified).