Maybe this is why Japan has such a high suicide rate? They always take their shoes off when they go inside, lowering the soil bacteria count inside the home.
Japanese suicide rate while high isn’t an outlier. It’s just 10% higher than in Belgium, and nobody ever talks about causes of suicide among Belgians. There are even countries like Lithuania with suicide rate 60% higher than Japan.
Very interesting that China is the only country (that I noticed) where women have a higher suicide rate than men. In the Slavic countries men kill themselves ~5 times more often.
São Tomé and Príncipe too, but it’s probably small sample effect.
But Chinese data surprises me—I would have guessed that skewed gender ratio would work to advantage of women, but the result is the opposite, so it must be something else going on.
Or are men just less competent at that? Googling says they make more suicide attempts:
Suicide has become one of the greatest health concerns worldwide. Statistics show that annually, an estimated total of 1 million people commit suicide, and the number of failed suicide attempts is more than 10 times the figure.
[...]
In terms of suicide attempts, rural areas outnumber urban areasand males outnumber females. The young and the old stand at the forefront, Zhang Zhou added.
I’ve read that, in the U.S., women make more suicide attempts than men, but are more likely to survive them, because men tend to use more lethal methods. (Women are less likely to try to kill themselves using a gun, for example.)
According to that article and some others most suicide attempts in China are unplanned and involve self-poisoning. Perhaps men having larger bodies are less likely to succeed.
So I wonder how much cross-country variability is about variability in suicide attempt rates, and how much due to different techniques used.
Maybe this is why Japan has such a high suicide rate? They always take their shoes off when they go inside, lowering the soil bacteria count inside the home.
Japanese suicide rate while high isn’t an outlier. It’s just 10% higher than in Belgium, and nobody ever talks about causes of suicide among Belgians. There are even countries like Lithuania with suicide rate 60% higher than Japan.
Very interesting that China is the only country (that I noticed) where women have a higher suicide rate than men. In the Slavic countries men kill themselves ~5 times more often.
São Tomé and Príncipe too, but it’s probably small sample effect.
But Chinese data surprises me—I would have guessed that skewed gender ratio would work to advantage of women, but the result is the opposite, so it must be something else going on.
Or are men just less competent at that? Googling says they make more suicide attempts:
I’ve read that, in the U.S., women make more suicide attempts than men, but are more likely to survive them, because men tend to use more lethal methods. (Women are less likely to try to kill themselves using a gun, for example.)
According to that article and some others most suicide attempts in China are unplanned and involve self-poisoning. Perhaps men having larger bodies are less likely to succeed.
So I wonder how much cross-country variability is about variability in suicide attempt rates, and how much due to different techniques used.
For some reason, European countries speaking Finno-Ugric langauges have high suicide rates:
It doesn’t seem so, Estonia has a lot lower rate than nearby Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, and Belarus.
Hungary has slightly lower rate than its Slavic neighbour Slovenia. Its other neighbours Croatia and Serbia and Montenegro have fairy high rates too.
Finland has higher suicide rate than Sweden and Norway, but much lower than its other neighbour Russia, and comparable with nearby Estonia.
These facts are pretty good counter-evidence for the theory that there’s some special Finno-Ugric—suicide connection.
A single tear rolls down the cheek of Benjamin Whorf’s ghost.