this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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About 49,500 people took their own lives last year in the U.S., the highest number ever, according to new government data posted Thursday.

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[–] megane_kun@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Indeed. A quick check on the available studies on suicidal ideation (worldwide) led me to this study, which I can't vouch for, but still gives me an indication that it's not just our bubbles that's led us to thinking it's prevalent.

To quote its abstract:

The prevalence of SI (suicidal ideation) ranged across regions from 14.3% to 22.6%; the prevalence of SA (suicide attempts) ranged from 4.6% to 15.8%. Year was not associated with increasing STB (suicidal thoughts and behaviors) prevalence except for studies from the United States, which showed increasing rates of SI and SA since 2007.

Taking these figures at face value, around one out of five people worldwide have thoughts of suicide. Or by cobbling together estimates of world population aged under 25y/o and multiplying by 17% (harmonic mean of 14.3% and 22.6% to two sig figs), that's roughly 550 million people. More than the US population, according to Wolfram Alpha.

Of course, that's just very rough data, but still quite sobering if you ask me.

[–] heyoni@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm just confirming here but prevalence implies that these statistics take into account size of the population measured? Like, suicide per capita has gone up?

[–] megane_kun@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago

If I am reading the abstract of the study I linked correctly, yeah. The percentage is of the population size (of youths--which I didn't see a more stringent definition of).

The part I quoted also said, if I am understanding it correctly, that the year (hence, time) is only a factor in studies from the US. I guess you can say that it's saying two different things. The "14.3% to 22.6" figure is for youth worldwide, but not accounted for time (hence, can't say if it's increasing or not). Then the studies from the US indicate that it's rising (for the US).