so you dont think throwing a pandemic in the mix would make it worse?
How many people do you know flirt with suicide?
Fwiw I agree the OD stats are messing things up. But I donāt know. The people I have known who want to kill themselves, would not be any more likely be to do it now.
I do see how a pandemic can make it better in that fewer people are bragging about their fantastic lives on social media, but still, pandemicā¦
I think the results of such a study might be flawed
Dont know. People dont always talk about it. I know one person who committed suicide and I was shocked by it, but I found out her issues after the fact. She was bipolar. Seemed to have everything going for her too.
iām not sure there is a typical person who commits suicide. i have a sample size of one, and she seemed pretty not typical to me. the type of person everyone likes the minute they met her. huge people pleaser and over achiever. it was really sad.
Iāve read this sentence several times and Iām not quite sure what you mean by it?
I will comment though, that suicides and ODs are often lumped together as ādeaths of despairā. So it would be interesting (in a sad morbid way, but of course we are actuaries) to see how deaths of despair changed during the pandemic.
If depressed folks turned to drug use to a greater degree than before the pandemic then it could just be that the overdoses killed a bunch of people with depression a week or two sooner than they would have otherwise made a successful suicide attempt.
And if theyāre not working anyway then there are fewer drug tests / reasons to stay off drugs. I donāt think the unemployment office cares. (There was a drive a number of years ago to change that, but I donāt think it was successful.) Depending on the employerā¦ some randomly drug test. Many require a negative drug test as a condition of employment. But a lot of that went away an employment numbers plummeted.
And if the departments of family services stopped or slowed drug testingā¦ I think a LOT of people halted drug use when they were trying to get their kids back after the state took them away and put them in foster care. No clue how all of that proceeded during the shutdown or what changes might have happened.
Those cultures often take in extended family members when they are down. In the US, many have little to fall back on unless they are lucky and have living, financially stable, and accommodating parents.
Also, the stigma of doing that
I think more people donāt take drugs today because they have to go to work than donāt take drugs because they are afraid of a drug test. Iām sure that unemployment increased drug use.
I mean that most drug overdoses are mistakes, not attempts to die. I mean, youāve talked about enjoying getting drunk. You werenāt trying to kill yourself, you were just trying to enjoy feeling high.
And i donāt see any obvious reason why whoever classifies drug overdose deaths would be less likely to call one a suicide this year than any other year.
Yeah, I didnāt really word my post right, but I meant to include those folks too.
But I was thinking about all the out of work medical employees in non-emergency jobs, airline employees, manufacturing, private securityā¦ industries where random drug tests were common and unemployment was way up. Maybe someone kicked that heroin habit years ago and turned their life around and found work as an airplane mechanic but now theyāre out of work and collecting unemployment so f- it. Letās do some heroin again. No longer risking the job, so nothing to lose. How much? Oh, the dose they used to use. Body can no longer handle that much and they OD.
I lost a HS friend that way a few years ago. Was injured in the army and turned to heroin when they stopped letting him have the narcotics heād grown addicted to post injury. Was an addict for several years, got help, kicked the habit and was clean for a long time. No one is quite sure what happened that made him decide to go back to heroin, but he did after like a decade of sobriety and he ODādā¦ we believe on his very first time using heroin in years.
Cop friend of mine said this is incredibly common and he sees it all the time when they are called out to check on a report of a dead body or a bad smell coming from the next apartment or a missing person reportā¦
Recovered addicts know exactly how much they used to take and when they fall off the bandwagon they inevitably go back to their old doseā¦ a dose that theyād gradually built up to initially but which their body can no longer handle. Just like losing your tolerance for alcohol after you stop drinking for a while. Except that alcohol is far less likely to kill you if you drink the same quantity that your body used to be able to handle.
But of course all of that can happen whether you previously worked in an industry that random drug tests or not. I believe that sometimes recovering addicts seek out that type of work as an extra motivation to stay clean. But they might have a job that doesnāt drug test but they choose not to do drugs because they want to do good work (or at least good enough to not get fired, anyway).
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Sure, with you so far.
Nah. I enjoy drinking. Not specifically getting drunk. In fact, I specifically try to avoid getting drunk. I was pretty sloshed on Passover though.
Correct.
Not really, but Iām sure this applies to others who drink.
Yeah, I doubt that itās intentional suicides being misclassified unless there was a change in the criteria for how they classify intentional vs accidental overdoses. It would be interesting to see those two side by side, but I believe that intentional overdoses are simply classified as suicide. Iām not sure how easy it is to parse out the method of suicide. Guns are a pretty common form of method though so you wouldnāt think that a change in how they decide whether an overdose was intentional or not would cause such a dramatic drop in suicides all by itself.
That said, intentional overdose sounds like a hell of a lot more pleasant way to go than a gun shot wound to me. In fact a bunch of years ago I brought it up as a possible method of execution in a thread about the death penalty and whether or not lethal injections were inhumane. (As in replace the current lethal injection with the option to get a quantity of opioids known to be lethal.)
But Iām not suicidalā¦ I donāt know if this is how suicidal people think. And I donāt know why Covid would cause people to change the way they choose to off themselves.
Youād think that with gun sales up that guns would be more readily available for potential suicides. But perhaps itās survivalists that are driving the gun sales and maybe suicide rates are low among survivalists? I dunno.
Even if thatās correct it would only explain the lack of increase in suicides in light of the increase if gun sales. It wouldnāt explain the decrease in suicides unless the suicidal folks are the ones selling their guns. Whichā¦ seems unlikely.
Most Americans have some form of health insurance, home insurance, car insurance, employment insurance, charity care, ssi, ssdi, homeless shelters, food kitchens, foster care, public schools, charities, and accommodating family on top of every thing else. Also we have things like effective fire-alarms, lots of hygiene, and modern medicine to keep us from falling down in the first place.
I realize we could have more safety nets, but if youāre in a developing country you can lose your family/farm to a drought or a fire or preventable illness you might have some family who have resources or you might just be SOL, begging so you donāt starve and maybe starving amyway. Even the beggars in america are usually not starving in rags.
Speaking of, the only suicidal person I know right now is suicidal because of nothing in particular. He has just always been that way. He could work but he is depressed of course, so he depends on: SSDI, Medicaid, SNAP, and family to pay for more doctors, meds, shrinks, nice housing, and various luxuries. Heās an isolated example, but I wonder a lot whether any of the support he receives helps him at all.
Well, itās not easy-to-use, exactly, but here:
https://wonder.cdc.gov/Deaths-by-Underlying-Cause.html
It is kinda slow.
The last few days, Iāve been pulling detail, but there is so much (such as āW39 - discharge of fireworkā) so let me give some aggregate results, and just by number, not rate:
stacked column:
line:
Iāve started on slices by sex & age groupā¦
Let me see if I can give a list of what is captured under what I labeled āchemical accidentsā - aka poisoningsā¦ and Iāll have to re-look-up how to spoiler things, because I donāt need to do a long list
The āchemical accidentsā list (at the level of detail Iām looking at) is actually not that long. Here it is:
| ICD Code | Underlying cause of death |
|---|---|
| X40 | Accidental poisoning by and exposure to nonopioid analgesics, antipyretics and antirheumatics |
| X41 | Accidental poisoning by and exposure to antiepileptic, sedative-hypnotic, antiparkinsonism and psychotropic drugs, not elsewhere classified |
| X42 | Accidental poisoning by and exposure to narcotics and psychodysleptics [hallucinogens], not elsewhere classified |
| X43 | Accidental poisoning by and exposure to other drugs acting on the autonomic nervous system |
| X44 | Accidental poisoning by and exposure to other and unspecified drugs, medicaments and biological substances |
| X45 | Accidental poisoning by and exposure to alcohol |
| X46 | Accidental poisoning by and exposure to organic solvents and halogenated hydrocarbons and their vapours |
| X47 | Accidental poisoning by and exposure to other gases and vapours |
| X48 | Accidental poisoning by and exposure to pesticides |
| X49 | Accidental poisoning by and exposure to other and unspecified chemicals and noxious substances |
FWIW, one can get to detail on drug for drug overdoses, but thatās a different thing, and I havenāt started pulling that specific info yet.
But you may be interested in order of magnitude differences in these causes.
Rather than graph that, I will give you the number of deaths for 2019 for all those causesā¦ and sort the list. NOTE: this is count of āunderlying cause of deathā ā there can be only one on a death certificate.
There can be multiple ācontributing causesā, and thatās not the count below. There is no double-counting.
| Cause of death | Cause of death Code | Deaths |
|---|---|---|
| Accidental poisoning by and exposure to narcotics and psychodysleptics [hallucinogens], not elsewhere classified | X42 | 29,803 |
| Accidental poisoning by and exposure to other and unspecified drugs, medicaments and biological substances | X44 | 24,587 |
| Accidental poisoning by and exposure to antiepileptic, sedative-hypnotic, antiparkinsonism and psychotropic drugs, not elsewhere classified | X41 | 7,474 |
| Accidental poisoning by and exposure to alcohol | X45 | 2,291 |
| Accidental poisoning by and exposure to other gases and vapours | X47 | 994 |
| Accidental poisoning by and exposure to nonopioid analgesics, antipyretics and antirheumatics | X40 | 281 |
| Accidental poisoning by and exposure to other and unspecified chemicals and noxious substances | X49 | 258 |
| Accidental poisoning by and exposure to organic solvents and halogenated hydrocarbons and their vapours | X46 | 51 |
| Accidental poisoning by and exposure to other drugs acting on the autonomic nervous system | X43 | 27 |
| Accidental poisoning by and exposure to pesticides | X48 | 7 |
Do they have data for method of suicide? Because as I mentioned I think it might be interesting to compare accidental overdoses with intentional overdoses.
So i guess that X47 includes all the farm workers who walk into a warehouse full of nitrogen and never walk out?
I wonder what else is in that number. Itās fairly large.
Also, thanks!
And there are two ways to spoiler
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Spoiler type 2, āblurredā
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