What Can We Learn From Suicide Rates In 100 Countries Between 1985 & 2016
A masters thesis data was put into Kaggle, named “Suicide Rates Overview 1985 to 2016 - Compares socio-economic info with suicide rates by year and country”. When I download the data and explore for a while, I saw that the data can teach us some about how the changes in the world possible affected the most final action that can be done by one’s self.
Suicide generally described as the act of intentionally causing one’s own death. All causes are still unknowable but many disorders especially mental and personality disorders, substance usage, and other external and internal factors are involved but there is no generalizable list of causes that fits all cases and most probably will never be. So why scientists research about suicide? In my psychology education, we tried to understand suicide by using various models of causes and factors in the literature.
The distribution of suicide rates between age ranges shows us the general bias about suicide is most common in the teenage group. This is a misconception, according to data. The distribution says that neither teenagers nor young adults not the most common age range in terms of suicide rates. Middle adults showed the highest suicide rate and this rate was even more than the total amount of teenage and young adult rates. Of course, we should not forget that this consumption comes from the data but we should also consider that the data includes 27.820 participants from 100 countries with equal gender and age group distributions. So, what can be the reason for that? Why the middle adult population had that much of a risk of suicide between 1985 and 2016? Is it because of the dramatical changes in the world economy? The rapid development of technology? We can never be sure about the internal and many external causes of these cases but still can there be a global factor affected their internal and external world? These questions may take us to the point of where this world is coming to. Wars, scientific development, technology, industry, societal changes, economic crisis, and or many possible situations in our environment may take more influence in our actions towards our own selves. Can you imagine the perspective of a person at 50s in 1900s or 2000s? The point that the person comes from the world that s/he was born into?
What about gender? The equal numbers in each sex make the data available to look at gender differences over the years when it comes to killing one’s self. As you can see from the right side of the charts, the number of suicides showed with larger ranges for males. This indicates the high variability of suicide rates in males over the years is more and sometimes even doubled compared to females. From the middle to end of 1980s rates don’t really show big differences but after 1988, there is a big difference for males but not that big for females.
Data also allows us to see that population size is a big indicator and one of the causes of suicide rates in general. For people who live in countries with bigger populations are more likely to attempt suicide compared to countries with small populations.
Ok, I know you did not start to read this story to be drawn by statistics, so let's give us a minute to think.
People suicide in bigger countries for decades but still is a big population always a bad thing? We cannot see this in the data but we can think about it. What do you think? Think about that you live in a country with a really small population. Would that mean that you will always be happy? No, right? The table in the left does agree with us as well. The effect of a population may lead us wrong assumptions, we need to understand how the population would affect. In the data, GDP per year seems like a significant parameter of suicide rates as well. However, it seems like a higher GDP is correlated with higher suicide rates. Well, what? So countries who have more money for each citizen read more suicide news than countries that have less money per citizen in a year. Can you see that when the question is about suicide, the assumptions that we do for many actions do not fit in?
I wanted to write this to show how suicide is an exceptional action of an individual can possibly take. We automatically can think that a person killed him/herself because of financial issues, teenage struggles, or being fragile because of her gender… and many other guesses. However, reality does not seem even close to these guesses. People suicide and we cannot generalize that. Suicide is not like any other harmful or negative action because it can be a sign of big problems with one's self, life and more.
Do not underestimate or criticize it easily. This can be the most impossible perspective to take and understand from your eyes.
Every sign of suicide does need attention, every try does need help to avoid others in the future. Do not hesitate to ask for help!
Every person is unique, and killing one's own self is the most unique behavior in history.
You can find the data in https://www.kaggle.com/russellyates88/suicide-rates-overview-1985-to-2016?utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=kaggle-dataset-share&utm_source=twitter
