Senate Why are Americans so depressed? (Suicide is now #1 killer in USA)

You absolutely can rationalize away physical illnesses as well, to at least some extent.

There's certainly a very physical nature to things like depression, so I don't think it's that they can be uniquely rationalized away, but I'd think about it more in the context of something like obesity, where people certainly will deny that they don't have a problem, even though there clearly are physical harms associated with it.

 

Going back to suicide rates, maybe it's more instructive to look at the US's rate in context against the rest of the world. By Wikipedia, the US has a comparatively middling suicide rate compared to a hodgepodge of former Soviet bloc countries, China, Japan, or Greenland right up the top. Some of the rates at the bottom of the table are probably a bit dodgy given the age of the records -- Syria in particular hasn't given an official suicide rate since 1985 by the looks of it -- but the preponderance of small countries down than end of the table is intriguing. You don't reeeeally hit a "rich" country until about 10-15 spots up the list with Kuwait - and there, the suicide rates among men and women are equal. In very broad terms, it looks like suicide rates correlate with population, at least to my untrained eye. There could well be cultural implications, too: Bhutan and Nepal are next-door neighbours. Bhutan has one of the higher suicide rates in the world; Nepal has zero, at least officially. In Bhutan the speculation is that because the state religion is Tibetan Buddhism, it means there's a taboo on suicide or its discussion, which might contribute to it. And it's a significant suicide rate since Bhutan promotes "Gross National Happiness" as a government policy. The highest rate is among Bhutanese refugees, apparently. The Japanese suicide rate is also seen as inflated due to the cultural phenomenon of ritual suicide which dates back centuries there.

I also wonder to what extent euthanasia and ageing populations play into this? In countries where euthanasia for terminal cases is legal, that presumably would not be listed as a suicide, so you might expect the rate to otherwise be lower. Not to mention that, generally speaking in the West, though we have learned to prolong human life it's my personal view we haven't really managed to increase its quality during that lengthened term.

Is a high suicide rate a curse of the West's success, I wonder? Or, as is more likely the case, is it a range of interlocking factors, some of which predispose to high suicide rates and some of which merely contribute?

 

It's certainly going to be complex, but I'd also note that there's even substantial range within the US, as can be seen here: http://www.suicidology.org/c/document_library/get_file?folderId=262&name=DLFE-636.pdf

There does seem to be some correlation there with the states that are highest being ones that are more rural and more predominantly white, I believe, and so there does seem some element of correlation as that does also feature that white males have a suicide rate that is a few times higher than most other demographic groups.

 

I think it has to do with the fact that people live their lives in the function of materialistic things, and don't actually know what is important or essential for them.

 

I really don't see how materialism factors into depression, which is more a matter of brain chemistry.

 

People don't realise what they have, often in terms of support from family members and friends, and money trouble is something I can see people committing suicide about I don't think it's all about brain chemistry.