The puzzling link between air pollution and suicide

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230907-the-puzzling-link-between-air-pollution-and-suicide

by pmoriarty • 3 years ago

3 1 3 years ago

DanBC• 3 years ago

Gentle reminder that news media reports about suicide are usually full of errors if they didn't have a statistician with them while writing the report.

People in the US might be particularly troubled to learn that the suicides there have increased by around 40% over the past two decades. Last year, almost 50,000 people in the US took their own life – one death every 11 minutes – and the nation now has one of the highest rates of wealthy, developed countries. (For comparison, the UK suicide rate is around 25% lower than that of the US).

"Last year, almost 50,000 people took their life" -- did they? Or was that the year their death was registered? Did the covid pandemic create a backlog that caused deaths to be registered later?

"the UK rate is around" - but they link to an old release of the data, and it's for England and Wales and does not include Scotland and Northern Ireland.

This paragraph has two links, and compares them. The first link is to "Our world in data" and the second is to the UK's ONS. These count death differently, you cannot directly compare them. In England and Wales the ONS defines suicide as "which includes deaths with an underlying cause of intentional self-harm (ages 10 years and over) and deaths with an underlying cause of event of undetermined intent (ages 15 years and over).", but the CDC's definition does not include that "undetermined intent" bit. In the US suicide definitions require intent to die.

The article then has a bunch of speculation about potential mechanisms for pollution to be causing suicide, and not one mention of poverty.

The puzzling link between air pollution and suicide

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