Jul 1st, 2009 at 8:33 am
The Truth About Suicide
Every now and again someone mentions to me Scandinavia’s sky-high suicide rates as an argument against the Nordic social model. The thing of it is that if you look up the actual suicide data, the people of Iceland, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway all kill themselves at a rate below the OECD average:
It is, however, true that Finland has an alarmingly high suicide rate and that suicide is rarer in the United States than in any Nordic land. Mediterranean countries in general seem to have very low suicide rates, while rich Asian countries are suicide-heavy. And if I’m reading the chart correctly, the suicide gender gap is highest in Eastern European countries.
58 Responses to “The Truth About Suicide”
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July 1st, 2009 at 8:46 am
If the Nordic model produces more suicides, wouldn’t we expect the number of suicides to roughly correlate to the size of the country’s welfare provisions? Countries like the UK, Italy, and Netherlands all have much more generous unemployment benefits, health care, and social safety nets than the US and have lower suicide rates. Suicide rates are clearly influenced by many more factors than just the social model.
July 1st, 2009 at 8:47 am
My wife is Swedish, from the city of Umea to be precise, and she says that the biggest reason for the high suicide rate is seasonal.
The Scandinavian countries have long winters with very little sunlight. Suicide rates go way up during these times, and way down once the winter ends.
July 1st, 2009 at 8:55 am
Jim C. hit it on the head. Your rich Asian countries also have fairly northern latitudes. Add average hrs of sunlight to your graph and you’ll see a very different picture.
July 1st, 2009 at 8:55 am
The explanation for Finland is simple — hell, if I hear that damn default Nokia ringtone one more time, I might off myself.
Da na na na – na na na na – na na na na naaaaaa …
July 1st, 2009 at 8:58 am
I just got back from Iceland, and I can understand why the suicide rate is so much lower there than in any other Nordic country, in spite of the fact that Iceland is farther north and hence should suffer more suicide due to seasonal affect disorder: the country is just a wonderful place to be.
By contrast, I strongly suspect that cultural (and conceivably biological) factors have something to do with the fact that Finland and Hungary have so much higher suicide rates than the Nordic and Slavic countries that are their neighbors, and with whom they share the most geographic/climactic/economic factors.
July 1st, 2009 at 8:58 am
The vertical axis unit is suicides per 100,000 in 2004.
July 1st, 2009 at 9:00 am
The trend is clear: people who speak weird languages unrelated to major language families like to kill themselves.
July 1st, 2009 at 9:11 am
Suicide rates are inversely correlated to murder rates. At least, I read that somewhere, and it looks vaguely plausible from that graph. I’d like to see a regression on hours of sunlight, murder rates and social welfare provisions and see what happens. I really doubt there’d be a negative coefficient on social welfare provisions. If there was anything significant common sense suggests it would be positive.
July 1st, 2009 at 9:14 am
What the heck is up with Hungarian men? I don’t imagine seasonal affective disorder is much of a problem there. Talk about an outlier.
July 1st, 2009 at 9:14 am
Blah, sorry for being confusing. I reversed the signs in my head. I doubt there’d be a positive coefficient on social welfare provisions…. common sense suggests it would be negative if anything.
July 1st, 2009 at 9:20 am
REGARDING comment #9 by BRAGAN
I may be wrong about this but i think that at least some hungarians are descended from the hunnish tribes that settled in Hungary around 1500 years ago.I do know that the Finnish and the Estonians have asiatic ancestors. I do not know if that is why the suicide rate is high there ,but it is the only connection between Finland and Hungary that i know of.
July 1st, 2009 at 9:27 am
For what it’s worth i am generally content. But when i do get depressed it has nothing to do with the rate of welfare payments in this country.Despite what MR Yglesias says ,my understanding is that the Scandanavian suicide rate is fairly high and that depression is a problem. I just think that it has very little to do with what social system is there.
I think it is because of weather and the facts that some countries develop certain national characteristics.
Who knows ,maybe it’s all those Ingmar Bergman movies.
July 1st, 2009 at 9:29 am
The chart’s missing Russia, Belarus and the Baltic countries, which have high poverty rates and are quite northerly and I believe have very very high suicide rates (Wiki has Lithuania, Belarus, Russia 1,2,3). Also, the suicide rate of Inuits in northern Canada is a huge social problem–they are poor and have little sunlight in the winter. It would be worth measuring poverty rate alongside dark winters to see how the combination might be the key in the West. As far as Japan, suicide has ties to its culture that are quite foreign to the West.
July 1st, 2009 at 9:31 am
Given the relatively low suicide rates in Denmark and Sweden, I think culture is probably the most relevant factor. It is my understanding that Finns are not “Scandanavian” in the same historical, cultural sense that Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes are. I know their language is unrelated to the other Scandanavian language. 60 Minutes did a report on Finland a number of years ago that showed the people to be very staid and introspective. And in a country like Japan, where shame is a major cultural element, suicides would seem more likely.
July 1st, 2009 at 9:39 am
“By contrast, I strongly suspect that cultural (and conceivably biological) factors have something to do with the fact that Finland and Hungary have so much higher suicide rates than the Nordic and Slavic countries that are their neighbors…”
Ok, I’m curious: what possible biological factors could there be. Do you mean some ethnic groups might have a higher predisposition to suicide?
July 1st, 2009 at 9:49 am
That’s strange, because even my Swedish friends are making jokes about the suicide rate of their sun-deprived country.
Greece, Mexico, Italy and Spain at the bottom. The first lesson of this graph: “it’s too hot to kill myself”.
July 1st, 2009 at 9:50 am
I see everyone beat me to it…
July 1st, 2009 at 9:50 am
Despite what MR Yglesias says ,my understanding is that the Scandanavian suicide rate is fairly high and that depression is a problem.
“Despite what MR Yglesias says” = despite the evidence laid out for you in a chart? “Despite the data you just showed me, I’m going to stick with thinking something else because….I’ve heard stuff.”
Just stupid, man.
July 1st, 2009 at 9:52 am
AGT says:
Jim C. may have hit the nail on the head, but you haven’t. Tokyo is only 2 degrees higher (34) than Los Angeles(32), and Seoul(37) is only 5 degrees higher. Neither is further north than Seattle (47 degrees), so while the suicide rate in Nordic countries may be attributable to lack of sunlight, that is certainly not the case in East Asia. In Japan, at least, the common reason given for suicide is pressure from work, school, and generally failing to live up to society’s expectations.
July 1st, 2009 at 9:55 am
Finnish and Hungarian belong to the Finno-Ugric languages. Perhaps they have 50 words for “suicide”?
July 1st, 2009 at 10:13 am
You’re begging the question of whether suicide is a more reliable indicator of depression than murder or other crime. The reality is that there’s a big cultural difference between Americans and Scandinavians–when we Americans get depressed we often kill other people, but they just kill themselves. The US murder rate is about 6 per 100,000, but in Denmark it’s 1 per 100,000.
July 1st, 2009 at 10:18 am
The plot is for one year. Any one year can be an outlier, the mean number of suicides over a decade would be more useful. Another OECD plot shows these data for a numbe rof years and the rates in Hungary and Denmark are falling, while Japan and Greece have fairly constant rates. The highest Hungarian rates occurred during the communist years (early 80s, hmmm, is there a Reagan link?). The Irish rate has risen.
http://masetto.sourceoecd.org/vl=8897133/cl=34/nw=1/rpsv/factbook/11/02/01/11-02-01-g1a.htm
July 1st, 2009 at 10:45 am
Looking at state-by-state suicide rates, there does appear to be some link to the “endless night of winter” factor and suicide rates. Alaska has the highest suicide rate of any state by far, at 23.1 per 100,000. It tops almost any country on that list.
But this argument is undermined when we see that the #2 state on the US suicide list is Nevada. We could try to explain that away with a “Leaving Las Vegas” phenomenon…except that New Mexico is #3 in suicides.
In the US, there’s definitely a western bias in suicide rates. Maybe it’s got something to do with being on Mountain Time.
And given that DC & NY have the lowest suicide rates in the country, I’d like to speculate that robust public transit stops suicide. I don’t really think that’s true, but I’ll take my transit dollars by hook or by crook.
July 1st, 2009 at 10:48 am
I’m curious what the correlation would look like if you overlaid religiosity on this graph.
I think probably this is a case where we have to accept that the causes for a complex social phenomenon are multivariate, and it’s just kind of hard to say what’s underlying the trends without having more data. I imagine some combination of climate, social mobility, religious beliefs, gini coefficient, overall income levels, social cohesion, etc., etc., might explain a decent percentage of the variation, but idle speculation probably isn’t going to solve the puzzle.
I also wouldn’t completely discount biological explanations. Overall levels of happiness or life satisfaction are highly heritable. And many countries on that list are likely to represent genetically distinct populations. So it’s possible that genetics could be another influencing factor (although, again, just one of many).
July 1st, 2009 at 10:48 am
And, sunlight/mountain time/public transit jokes aside, it would be worthwhile to factor out age/gender in these state comparisons.
For all I know, we’re just ending up with suicide rates as a proxy measure for “what percentage of your population is men aged 17 to 40?”
July 1st, 2009 at 10:51 am
Perhaps the public health authorities in some countries are more (or less) likely to classify questionable cases as suicides as opposed to accidents or other causes. Many cases are obvious, but some are not, e.g. David Carradine, Freddie Prinze.
July 1st, 2009 at 10:55 am
The chart’s missing Russia, Belarus and the Baltic countries
…and every other country not in the OECD.
July 1st, 2009 at 10:57 am
@Peter — right, in addition to sunlight and income levels and all that other stuff, we should add a factor for incidence of autoerotic asphyxiation in the population. I think when we add that in, we’ll probably be most of the way there. After all, we all know that Finns love to wank themselves in closets.
July 1st, 2009 at 10:58 am
Is there a reason that you so often don’t label the axes (especially y) of your graphs!
July 1st, 2009 at 10:59 am
Me too, especially if you add in the religions with and without significance stigma laid on suicide.
July 1st, 2009 at 11:04 am
Wait — what do the Belgians have to be sad about?
July 1st, 2009 at 11:14 am
Jeremy Says:
Well I was about to post a comment about how even though Seoul and Tokyo aren’t all that far north, they still have relatively low levels of sunlight compared to the US with little seasonal variation (check here for the data). But then after a bit more googling it seems newer researcher suggests that sunlight actually triggers suicides.
So now I’ll just be quiet.
July 1st, 2009 at 11:20 am
Re: Religiosity; Japan & Northern Europe are certainly less religious than other countries listed here, and I think that, like weather has some affect on the suicide rates.
Here’s another graph which shows all the Scandi countries as having farly high rates: http://fathersforlife.org/health/who_suicide_rates.htm
July 1st, 2009 at 11:27 am
So does everyone agree we need more data?
anonymiss – very interesting. In a brief scan, I saw much less correlation between depression and suicide than I expected. This echos the comment re: cultural expression of depression.
July 1st, 2009 at 11:55 am
Of course Scandinavia has a high suicide rate! It’s higher than in the English-speaking countries, around which the world revolves, and against which everything is to be compared. Just like how Indians are dark-skinned and China is poor.
anonymiss – I’ve done some back-of-the-envelope (well back of the Excel spreadsheet) work on rates of mental illness and suicide rates internationally, and so far as I can see there is no correlation at all. This is probably because the way we measure mental illness in populations is stupid (see this post of mine.) I don’t know exactly where USA Today got their depression prevalence figures from but I suspect it’s from the same kind of deeply flawed telephone surveys.
July 1st, 2009 at 12:16 pm
Well, in the case of Finland, I think it’s probably that people just like to do this joke:
“Are you Finnish?”
“Well, almost…” (BANG!)
Hell, I’d be tempted myself.
July 1st, 2009 at 12:39 pm
anon @25 is almost right: suicide rates tend to increase at the upper age ranges, which is why Japan (with an older population) is the second highest even without adjusting for age. Without adjusting for age composition, this graph is mostly worthless.
July 1st, 2009 at 12:48 pm
Finnish and Hungarian are related, being the only two members of the Finno-Ugric language family and only very distantly related to other European languages. Discuss.
July 1st, 2009 at 12:49 pm
Pete from Baltimore is to punctuation what Matt Yglesias is to spelling.
July 1st, 2009 at 1:31 pm
Funny, I’d think of Nordic suicide rates as an argument against not seeing the sun for 6 months a year.
July 1st, 2009 at 2:11 pm
What I find striking is the gap between men and women. I don’t want to go all George Will here, but it is hard to give much credence to claims for how awful life is for women in Japan/Korea/America/TheEntireWorld when you see a plot like this.
Doubtless there is some defender of the orthodoxy willing to tell us that this is because women are more responsible than men and don’t want to kill themselves, thereby leaving kids/parents/pets in the lurch. Perhaps, but I’d like to see more evidence of that than merely a claim.
July 1st, 2009 at 2:47 pm
Their country is coming apart at the seems.
Perhaps the Finnish suicide rates are the product of being ruled by Conana O’brien?
July 1st, 2009 at 2:49 pm
38: Estonian is mutually intelligible with Finnish. There are also a number of other Finno-Ugric languages with smaller populations that speak them.
July 1st, 2009 at 2:57 pm
the #2 state on the US suicide list is Nevada. We could try to explain that away with a “Leaving Las Vegas” phenomenon…except that New Mexico is #3 in suicides.
That’s got to be a “Leaving Las Vegas” phenomenon, too!
July 1st, 2009 at 3:19 pm
In the case of Hungary, I think it’s mostly that people like doing this joke:
“Where are you from?”
“Well, where do you think I’m from?”
“I don’t know…Hungary?”
“No, I just had lunch.” At which point the first guy shoots the second guy, then makes it look like a suicide, in order to fit the premise.
July 1st, 2009 at 3:42 pm
Regarding comment #39
Actually ,I think that my spelling is worse than MR Yglesias’s .
July 1st, 2009 at 4:06 pm
For what it’s worth a few years back The Economist Magazine did an article on suicides and said that different nationalities used different methods to kill themselves.Some methods are better than others obviousely.
In countries where people shot themselves the suicide rate apparently was high.And in countries where people poisened themselves it was lower because sometimes the poison was thrown back up ,Or was to weak to work..
Their basic point was that some nationalities are better at killing themselves than others.As I recall the British tried suicide a lot but were not very good at it.The Economist actually made a small joke about that fact as I recall.
I wish that i could provide a link .But if anyone is curiouse ,it probably is on The Economist’s website.
Thank you to all of the other commenters here for the information they provided.I almost feel guilty enjoying reading about such a depressing subject.
July 1st, 2009 at 4:14 pm
Why do men commit suicide 4x or 9x more than women? Is it an example of the pressures put on men to not show emotion, and to provide and get along regardless of sadness, which causes people to finally implode? Or is it a difference in the methods preferred by each gender? I once heard that in the US men prefer shooting themselves while women prefer using meds, and meds don’t work as well.
July 1st, 2009 at 4:15 pm
To try and answer my own question about the gender gap, I wonder if it is due to the observed phenomenon (warning: anecdotes) of lonely guys being unable to find a partner, whereas a lonely woman could much more easily find a guy who would be her boyfriend. And thus a lonely guy may commit suicide, while a suicidal woman may have a man in her life who would try to prevent it or help with the depression.
July 1st, 2009 at 4:28 pm
And don’t even get me started on the Czechs and Poles.
July 1st, 2009 at 5:35 pm
It’s not clear from the graph or the link, but the graphs only plots succesful suicide attempts, not all suicide attempts.
Way back in med school I learned that even though men are five times more likely to die in a TS (tentamen suicidii), women are five times more likely to have a go. At which point our (female) teacher asked us to contemplate which of the two sexes is the smarter.
As I’m from the Netherlands, my med school teacher was obviously wrong. There’s only a 2.5-fold difference.
July 1st, 2009 at 6:17 pm
Re: I may be wrong about this but i think that at least some hungarians are descended from the hunnish tribes that settled in Hungary around 1500 years ago.
Probably there were some Huns in the area, along with the Avars (a Turkish people), some Germannic folks, and some Celts. But the last migration into Hungary was by the Magyars a Uralic people distantly related to (yep!) the Finns.
Re: It is my understanding that Finns are not “Scandanavian” in the same historical, cultural sense that Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes are.
Linguistically they aren’t– Finnish is a Uralic language. But Finland was ruled by Sweden for centuries, until the Tsar grabbed onto it while everyone was distracted by Napoleon’s antics, so culturally it’s more Swedish than anything else.
July 1st, 2009 at 8:41 pm
I am from Estonia neighbouring country to Finland. Estonians and finns are similar, languages are very similar, culturally, historically similar. Hungarian language belongs to same language tree, but is much more distant.
Estonia also has high suicide rate (from 18 to 25 in recent years. Usually it is explained: long and dark winters from one side and introvert people…
July 1st, 2009 at 10:28 pm
Regarding comment # 52 by MR JonF
MR JonF
You are right of course.I had read about about the Magyars ,but had always thought that they were a hunnish tribe ,since Attila and his huns had settled in Hungary. Obviously I was wrong. I am sure that the modern Hungarian has more Magyar blood in him than Hunnish blood.
Thank you for the correction and the new information.
Best regards to you MR JonF
July 1st, 2009 at 11:37 pm
Like several people have said, Estonian and Finnish are closely related Finno-Ugric languages, with Hungarian slightly more distantly related. But yeah, after centuries of domination, Finland is more Swedish than anything else, despite the language.
Hungarians are pretty much 100% Magyar, and there is no historical basis for descent from Huns. Hungarian ethnicity is made more confusing by the English name and Hungarian national mythology including a romantic notion of descent from the Huns. Attila is one of the most popular names for baby boys in Hungary.
Someone mentioned suicide rates in Inuit country. Across the Arctic in Canada, Greenland, northern Scandinavia, and Siberia suicide rates among young men are high. Since the cultures are so different it does suggest a climate based explanation.
@41, in a traditional honor based society the men are going to be the ones responsible for maintaining honor in public, hence more honor suicides.
July 2nd, 2009 at 4:59 am
You should also take into account that in secular countries like the Scandinavian ones suicides are less likely to be reported as something else, it not being as much of a social stigma.
July 2nd, 2009 at 2:36 pm
Interesting that Greece is always freakishly low. (see link at #22) It’s the only Orthodox country in the first graph, but other Orthodox countries like Russia and Belarus have high rates.
July 7th, 2009 at 11:52 am
The idea that Finns and Hungarians are genetically distinct because they speak non Indo-European languages is a half-educated fallacy. Many genetic studies have shown no evidence that they are distinct populations from the broader European gene pool. This is what you would expect given gene flow and the highly tenuous connection between language and ancestry. Conquerors may bring their language and religion but replacing the gene pool really requires mass-scale genocide (e.g. the Americas).