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Suicide As A Social Phenomenon

Enola Gaia,

I was thinking of the Social Worker who is allocated to a (often) teenager who has ended up in all kinds of problems often due to bad behaviour. Or to a family breakdown.

Not so much as the role usually filled by a psychologist., Someone you may go to if you feel you need to 'talk it out' with a person who is outside the problem.

INT21.
 
The result is a level of naive inexperience and passive receptivity that is greater than was tolerated in past times and which lingers for much longer that it once did.
Possibly the socio-economic conditions when the majority worked in long-term factory or industrial jobs were much less tolerant of navel gazing and angst. The young man had to grow up fast - it may well be the pressure to marry young and the necessity to support a family also thrust a certain maturity onto those who might otherwise dawdle to it.

Plus there was a certainty as to what one's role in life was and would be for the foreseeable future.

I'm not saying life down the mines was good or anything, but one grew up quick and shouldered one's responsibilities, and more importantly they were clearly signposted. We perhaps need more of the latter, but without the near back-breaking labour of the former.
 
At the most fundamental level, I blame certain interrelated global / societal trends for aggravating the situation:



The result is a level of naive inexperience and passive receptivity that is greater than was tolerated in past times and which lingers for much longer than it once did

The modern tendency for children to continue living with their parents is also, in my opinion, a contributing factor.

It is also altering the relationship between parent and child.
 
Coal,

Got to agree.

The stability is gone.

And the young now want the same rewards as the people who have many years of experience.

I often hear kids saying' I wouldn't get out of bed for less than ten Pound an hour'.

Basically they don't want to get out of bed at all.

INT21.
 
The modern tendency for children to continue living with their parents is also, in my opinion, a contributing factor.

It is also altering the relationship between parent and child.
Take a look at "The Captive Woman" by Hannah Gavron, in which she argues (convincingly) that in the late 1950's and 1960's people rushed into unsuitable marriages while young, simply to get out of their parents' houses.

The result was a generation of under educated women - having left school at 16, who'd never had a job, so were essentially trapped in marriages without recourse or other options in life.
 
... I was thinking of the Social Worker who is allocated to a (often) teenager who has ended up in all kinds of problems often due to bad behaviour. Or to a family breakdown.
Not so much as the role usually filled by a psychologist., Someone you may go to if you feel you need to 'talk it out' with a person who is outside the problem.

Understood ... However, I still stand by my intended point that there's an increasing tendency to 'outsource' problems by reaching out to institutionalized channels before getting one's own hands dirty attempting to dig him-/herself out of whatever malaise it may be.
 
Understood ... However, I still stand by my intended point that there's an increasing tendency to 'outsource' problems by reaching out to institutionalized channels before getting one's own hands dirty attempting to dig him-/herself out of whatever malaise it may be.

Maybe the art of introspection if becoming lost to the young ?

And the knowledge of 'when you find your getting yourself in a hole. First stop digging'.

That is a very Peterson view.
 
Frideswide,

A strange way to interpret what I wrote. Maybe you could explain in more detail how you come to that conclusion.

Line by line if you need to.


I got the same impression as frides when i read it, and the reason why seems to me to be obvious.
 
in 1984, the suicide rate in England and Wales was just over 4,000 a year. ... the number of suicides in the UK (ie inc NI and Scotland) in 2017 was 4,382,
Is this per 100,000 people or just the straight number? If the latter it would be a drop, given population increase?

Edit here are the stats. Suicide was at a high in the UK in 1988. Female suicide rates have gone from 1/3 to 1/4 of total; all have dropped somewhat.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_Kingdom
 
All the suicides, with one exception, that I have known, have been related to drug use. ...

This provides an opening for mentioning a point I'd wanted to bring up.

First, let me set some context ...

Some folks commit what amounts to suicide over the course of years - even decades - without ever resorting to a deliberate and decisive terminating action. The usual means is alcohol / drug abuse, sustained without interruption while sleep-walking through an unchanging routine. I'm talking about a comprehensive lifestyle here - not just heavy recreational usage.

At least 3 close acquaintances (including my only sibling and my high school era best friend) took this long-term route to oblivion. I've known 3 more who were on the same path, but managed to pull out or re-direct themselves after a scary medical wake-up call. In 4 of these 6 cases the person confessed to repeatedly considering, or attempting, suicide.

(NOTE: Two of these confessions were in writing and weren't discovered until after their deaths.)

In 1 case I personally witnessed an early suicide attempt (for the record - a male trying the prescription OD tactic) and helped the friend to survive. He would later make another unsuccessful attempt (again trying an OD) overseas.

My attitude toward all 6 is summarized by the cynical micro-obit I gave my teen-era best friend when he finally crashed after 30 years' effort - "Preceded in death by his life."

Having said this ... Here's my point ...

I consider suicide to be the decisive conclusion deliberately enacted by some of the folks burdened with a broader or more general malaise. It's an optional exit from a path many travel. I don't see the act of suicide as being a discrete phenomenon representing a focused, shrink-wrapped wad of angst. I see it as the most dramatic result of something bigger or more protracted. As such, I don't believe there's much that can be constructively said about suicide in and of itself.
 
.Personally i think there's two main types of suicide. Event suicides which happen due to some short term crisis point that the individual can't cope with long enough to rationalise and not do it, and those planned. i tend to agree with Enolagaia that those with the guts, plan it out and carry it through over a shortish period of time and the vast majority do it long term through drink, drugs or whatever, which of course doesn't show up as suicides but they are. Take that 4k figure and at least double it i reckon. It's one thing not wanting to exist, it's another jumping off a chair with a rope around your neck. Why more young men? well i think they tend to have less of a support structure amongst their friends or more likely just don't discuss it with their friends. At the risk of being called sexist, in my experience you tend to know if a woman friend is distressed as they make sure you know, whereas a friend of mine slashed his wrists, just luck i found him. I had no idea he was feeling that way.
 
In the UK people rarely use firearms for suicide. i've only skimmed these statistics https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopula.../suicidesintheunitedkingdom/2017registrations but hanging is the most common also for men is mostly middle aged not to mention, as a percentage suicides have gone down
That's great news for Britain. I have faith that Brexit will help y'all catch up with the rest of the world and that thanatos will prevail. I personally am not from the UK, and I am speaking about more global stats. On the other hand, I commend the use of hanging, it is a most cost effective and reliable way to kill someone. Rope is cheap and the noose is an easy knot to tie. The USA is so flashy and ostenatious in comparison to good hand crafted British rope. The young women of the world really need information like this to help them bridge the gender gap in suicide. I doubt that many glass ceilings are structurally secure enough to bear the weight of an adult human body.
:jtease:
 
^ :eek:

We don't have as many suicides by firearm for the same reason we don't have as many homicides by firearm, i.e. not just anyone can own a firearm.
 
The young women of the world really need information like this to help them bridge the gender gap in suicide.

Wouldn't it be better (that is give more people more of a chance to think about it again) to stop the young men being so incompetent that they actually kill themselves?

*rolleyes*
 
Maybe ropes for hanging are too feminine and men feel emasculated using them. More manly ropes would no doubt cut down on male suicides by shootings.
 
Casper' and Enola Gaia seem to be on the right track. At least to my point of view.

The expression 'Drank himself to death' is one we often hear about some one noted for his drinking habits.
But we do not often consider it a 'long term suicide by alcohol' which it may be. Some drink too much because they simply like it. But most appear to be drinking to hide some over arching problem. And often you would never guess what the problem is.

Today's living does not hold much of a future fore many. And they may take to drink or drugs to 'escape' having to think about it.
I expect we will see much more of it in the future as more people want to get off this ride.

INT21.
 
I got the same impression as frides when i read it, and the reason why seems to me to be obvious.

Remind me which post you are referring to.

I want to go back and look at it.
 
Maybe ropes for hanging are too feminine and men feel emasculated using them. More manly ropes would no doubt cut down on male suicides by shootings.

Probably not.

Suicide by shooting is very quick and relatively foolproof.

Hanging can go wrong and result in the person taking a long time to die. Remember that in a 'proper' (execution) hanging the idea is to break the neck, not to strangle the subject.
 
Probably not.

Suicide by shooting is very quick and relatively foolproof.

Hanging can go wrong and result in the person taking a long time to die. Remember that in a 'proper' (execution) hanging the idea is to break the neck, not to strangle the subject.
perhaps I should've added #sarcasm.
 
... Incidentally, I read that suicide statistics in Ireland (at least in the '80's) were practically meaningless - the stories of suicide notes found and hidden by Catholic family members were probably a myth (certainly difficult to prove). But a Coroner whose jurisdiction covered a river near Dublin never gave a verdict of suicide, every body recovered was a result of accidental drowning. I also think there is a big difference between the UK and the US in the number of suicides by deliberate vehicle crashes (I've earmarked the cliff in Cornwall where I'm taking my motorbike one day) - crashes in this country tend to be all treated as accidental. ...

... I think the shock headlines are about suicide being the highest cause of death for young men, NOT specially that there are lots of suicides. Just speculating, but maybe 20 years ago more young men died in other ways- car accidents, drugs, juvenile cancer? who knows. But I guess if those reasons for death have been solved, suddenly suicide numbers start to look worse.

I think both these posts touch on a persistent pair of problems in analyzing the subject of suicide:

- whether anyone / everyone else recognizes a death as a suicide
- how anyone / everyone else reacts to a suicide (e.g., hiding the fact; being in denial)

I once witnessed a horrific auto accident in which I barely got out of the way before a young man shot past me at insane speed, then within a few seconds suddenly veered off our side of the expressway and directly into an overpass abutment. He was going so fast his muscle car went airborne and splatted against the abutment circa 6 - 8 feet off the ground. There was no obstructing or interfering vehicle he could have been dodging. The abutment was the center support for the only overpass visible for circa 1 mile in either direction. Hot-rodding idiot exceeding the limits of his competence? Deliberate suicide by car? The flurry of news stories and the final police report hand-waved that it must have been the former (though it was never proven). I saw it happen, and if it wasn't a deliberate suicide it was a damned fine simulation of one.

It's essentially impossible to identify some deaths as possible suicides without drawing a conclusion about the deceased's mental state. Above and beyond the obvious ambiguities and uncertainty this entails, there's a bias relating to the second problem ...

Suicide bothers the living to no end. It represents someone's ultimate refutation or rejection of everyone's most basic and protected feature (i.e., life itself).

The cliched response "How could he / she do this to me / us?" isn't just a cliche - I've heard it (and grimaced) many times in the wake of a suicide. The implied social stigma of suicide is so deeply troubling it's no wonder surviving friends and family members commonly declare the incident off-limits for discussion, hide / deny it, or treat it as an insult perpetrated by the deceased. Similarly, it's no wonder others (e.g., authorities; coroners) may obfuscate or mask any conclusion pointing to intentional self-destruction.

This is why I've usually taken suicide statistics with a grain of salt.
 
I can interpret that as many suicides are done by people who may feel (and often are) trapped in a situation they can't get out of. If they simply walk away from it they face the condemnation of the people they know, or they have the person(s) who were the cause of the situation hounding them fore the rest of their lives.
Or any number of mitigating circumstances.

So they take the only way they see as bringing an end to the misery.

Maybe hoping for another chance in reincarnation.

INT21.
 
Seeing how much sunk in from the lecturers and books from 35 years ago, We weren't studying suicide per se, we were assessing the best method of studying the phenomena. There were far fewer Coroners in the '80s, newly half were part-time and they came from a varied legal or medical background (Coroners nowadays all have to be lawyers). They all had the same legal definition of 'suicide' (self inflicted .. in sound mind .. death within a year and a day) but how they concluded whether a death was an accident, misadventure or suicide was largely up to them - there's weren't any written rules.
So how do you know if some-one comitted suicide or died accidentally ? You can't ask the victim - sometimes they will leave a note, sometimes there are religious or cultural reasons why a found note goes missing, many times there is no note. Some Coroners would look into the background and past of the deceased for clues: mental, emotional, physical, or sexual abuse, alcohol or drug abuse, traumatic experiences, perceived depression etc and reach their conclusions. Others are reluctant to give a suicide verdict under any circumstances. But Coroners are not trained Psychologists and their findings become self-fulfilling statistics ie if you look for the causes of suicide in statistics (the empirical viewpoint), all you'll find are the personal biases of the Coroners that lead to their verdict.
I could go on (but won't), the Marxist viewpoint, Phenomenological Ethno-methodology - the point is that I don't really trust the popular media with statistics. Suicide may well be the biggest killer of young men and that's a powerful headline, just don't know the significance yet.
 
But do you agree that, what with the likely reduction in available employment and thus the loss of status, the number of young male suicides is likely to increase ?
 
Given that we don't know what the drivers are...
 
Take a look at "The Captive Woman" by Hannah Gavron, in which she argues (convincingly) that in the late 1950's and 1960's people rushed into unsuitable marriages while young, simply to get out of their parents' houses.

The result was a generation of under educated women - having left school at 16, who'd never had a job, so were essentially trapped in marriages without recourse or other options in life.


I disagree with that premise.

From what I saw, and remember, there were three options for women and all three involved not getting married.

The first was working in a bank, the second was studying and becoming a teacher, the third - becoming a novitiate. All three were ended by marrying

Women had only one option if they wanted to work once they were married and that was becoming a school cleaner.


Whatever the career path, once women 'settled down' and married, that was it.

Also, girls were told that they were leaving school to help their mum out - or their parents couldn't see the point of further education for a woman because she was just going to have babies.

No. It was a social thing, like many other aspects of that time repeated and confirmed by society in general.

Your opinion may vary.
 
Mungoman,

Where I live, in the 50's-60's many women went to work in the mills.

And unless they were ex-grammar school, the options for further education were pretty limited.

It is a fact though, that getting a husband and having a child was sometimes seen as a way out of the family home.

But we are wandering off-topic.
 
Wouldn't it be better (that is give more people more of a chance to think about it again) to stop the young men being so incompetent that they actually kill themselves? *rolleyes*
I think you have this all wrong. I can't imagine anything quite so incompetent as a failed suicide. It is sort of the bottom of the bottom for me.
To be so hopeless that you want to kill yourself, then trying suicide and failing. Sheesh! Or worse, failing suicide multiple times... That is the very definition of total incompetence, surely? Yes, I know that there is the whole diminished capacity that comes on with deep depression, but still, if you are going to do something, at very least get it right.

A great fool I know once tried to commit suicide when his boyfriend left him by putting his head in a swimming pool. He did this quite a few times, and wondered why nobody was taking him seriously. Of course we would have intervened if he looked like doing something more credible, but mostly we just stifled our laughter as best we could. 30 failed suicide attempts in one hour. I think it may be some sort of record.

I would have been a lot more sympathetic and quick to act if I thought the individual in question was actually attemtping genuine self harm. I was also late to the party, and had to be informed about why the hell Mr. X was dunking his head in the pool and blowing bubbles over and over again. Goths, especially old one like myself, deal with a lot of "suicide", and you quickly get a sense for what is real distress and what is attention seeking.
 
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I've lost four younger friends because they committed suicide in the last thirteen years, three hung themselves and one took a medication overdose. Two of them were successful (if you can describe killing yourself as 'successful') only after the second attempt. All of them were between the ages of twenty to thirty.

Anyone reading this thread who feels they might want to do this, please instead contact the mental health charity MIND instead, or your GP, or The Samaritans, or The Suicide Prevention Hotline, they have a combination of techniques to support you.

My Mrs was in bits when this lad in the video below achieved suicide on his second attempt, he was one of her members of staff and brought her a bunch of flowers when he was discharged from the hospital after his first attempt
, she'd sent him a get well soon card with a picture of the sea because that was his favourite spot to chill. I argued after the first attempt that he should have instead been temporarily sectioned and spoke to our shadow health secretary Norman Lamb who agreed ... the shit's really hit the fan now that the next one to hang himself was Adam, his cousin. Questions are finally being aggressively asked. His BMX was wheeled into the church at the funeral by his brother who still works for the Mrs. Kids are being let down.


https://www.mind.org.uk/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIiM7d7dnv4AIVQrTtCh2lwQrkEAAYAiAAEgKuQ_D_BwE
 
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I think you have this all wrong.

Or I am illustrating how a personal bias influences interpretation - hence the *rolleyes*.

I think you have this all wrong. I can't imagine anything quite so incompetent as a failed suicide. It is sort of the bottom of the bottom for me.
I think you have this all wrong. I can't imagine anything quite so incompetent as a failed suicide. It is sort of the bottom of the bottom for me.

can't imagine anything quite so incompetent as a failed suicide. It is sort of the bottom of the bottom for me.
To be so hopeless that you want to kill yourself, then trying suicide and failing. Sheesh! Or worse, failing suicide multiple times... That is the very definition of total incompetence, surely?

Move away from your own definitions that label people incompetent and consider and alternative scenarios. It's an exercise. Used to do it with late teens.

Some one who has it in their head that the reason people do whatever it is - the "correct" reason in their view - is to kill themselves, won't be able to change the emphasis. Instead of stating that the subgroup that doesn't reach what you think is the goal, trying changing the terms.

For example, rather than group A failing and group B succeeding, try the idea that they are after different goals. In this case this leads to the possibility that group B is failing at "trying to get help" and group A is succeeding.

but still, if you are going to do something, at very least get it right.

Totally agree with this. One of the ways "we get it right" here is to look at all views of something, coming out of comfort zones and trying different a different model. For the exercise it doesn't have to work, it has to stretch us - of course, then we should look at of the mind refusing to swallow is confirmation bias or because something doesn't fit.

Perhaps the person in your anecdotal evidence wasn't trying to kill himself and failing. He was trying to connect, ask for help, get a human contact - and failing. My own bias here means that my primary analysis here is that isn't primarily to do with him, it's to do with those he was trying to communicate with - "A great fool ", "hopeless ", "Sheesh ", "worse", "total incompetence ", "nobody was taking him seriously ", "we just stifled our laughter ", "attention seeking"... perhaps his error lay in him trying to communicate with this particular group of people? Remember, this is an exercise, don't get attached to the idea of discrediting a possible interpretation - this is one of the things we do here, isn;t it?

Goths, especially old one like myself, deal with a lot of "suicide", and you quickly get a sense for what is real distress and what is attention seeking.

I'll rephrase this from my own angle "Teachers/members of a group where the suicide rate is greater than the general population, especially old ones like myself, deal with a lot of suicide, and you quickly get a sense that trying to find out the why and wherefore is akin to the problem of accurate weather forecasting."

I think you have this all wrong. I can't imagine anything quite so incompetent as a failed suicide. It is sort of the bottom of the bottom for me.

Really? I can imagine quite a few things, including the framing of the statement! :rollingw::rollingw::rollingw::oldm:
 
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