The annual U.S. firearm suicide rate in 2022 increased to the highest documented level since at least 1968, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
A lot of people talking about means seem to be side stepping the fact that life is getting harder and that’s probably why suicides are going up.
The means do matter, but the means aren’t driving the wave we’ve seen this decade. Most suicides are finances and loneliness related. And even if someone does survive an attempt using another mean, the “help” is usually involuntary institutionalization which will make your life even worse. Even getting a driver’s license is harder after that.
Not to discredit the means, I just think we need to take a hard look at everything surrounding said means. Society needs to fail someone 1,000 times before they pick up the final societal failure.
Social media is pretty poisonous for people, and has led to some extreme levels of alienation between people caught up in it and their close friends and family (which is the historical support network).
So people who see the world more like the strangers they have no practical connection with and obsess over the ways in which they see the world differently from those they actually have connections with leads to a very dark place.
There’s a number of different factors going on, but I remember seeing private market research around two years ago at the striking divide even within households and realizing we were headed towards serious problems.
Everything is extremist, categorized by binary teams, and outrage driven.
That’s not a recipe for a healthy social life, and not having a healthy social life or feeling apart from those in one’s life can be devastating on mental health.
A lot of people talking about means seem to be side stepping the fact that life is getting harder and that’s probably why suicides are going up.
The means do matter, but the means aren’t driving the wave we’ve seen this decade. Most suicides are finances and loneliness related. And even if someone does survive an attempt using another mean, the “help” is usually involuntary institutionalization which will make your life even worse. Even getting a driver’s license is harder after that.
Not to discredit the means, I just think we need to take a hard look at everything surrounding said means. Society needs to fail someone 1,000 times before they pick up the final societal failure.
Social media is pretty poisonous for people, and has led to some extreme levels of alienation between people caught up in it and their close friends and family (which is the historical support network).
So people who see the world more like the strangers they have no practical connection with and obsess over the ways in which they see the world differently from those they actually have connections with leads to a very dark place.
There’s a number of different factors going on, but I remember seeing private market research around two years ago at the striking divide even within households and realizing we were headed towards serious problems.
Everything is extremist, categorized by binary teams, and outrage driven.
That’s not a recipe for a healthy social life, and not having a healthy social life or feeling apart from those in one’s life can be devastating on mental health.