Suicide and Trumpism

cawacko said:
How much of a bubble do you live in in NYC?
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It's pretty much impossible to live in a bubble in NYC. Remember, NYC is ridiculously diverse -- and not only in racial terms. People come to NYC from all over the country and all over the world. We have oodles of people from almost any background you can imagine. That includes a whole lot of refugees from Trump Country.

Think about it: in small-town America, just how many people do you meet who grew up in the heart of a big, cosmopolitan city like New York? Very few, if any. But in the heart of a big, cosmopolitan city like New York, you regularly meet people who grew up in small-town America. I know lots of people from Trump Country backgrounds, and a common comment by such people is how they never even met various sorts of people until they moved to New York (or at least until they headed off to college). For example, they may never have known a gay person growing up, or a Jew, or a Muslim, or an immigrant, or someone of Asian ancestry, etc. The bubbles in this country definitely aren't the big cities. It's the small towns, where you can live your life while meeting hardly anyone from outside that little bubble.
 
Cypress said:
I think it is pretty obvious from this message board, and many others, that white nationalists, xenophobes, and degenerate bigots spend inordinate amounts of their lives - countless hours - indulging in resentment, cynicism, nursing petty grudges. They spend a lot of time stressing out about "invasions from the south", "feminazis", "immigrants from sh*thole countries", welfare-hogging "darkies", the imagined horrors of Sharia Law, and dirty "towel heads".

Living with that kind of negativity, hate, and cynicism had to poison their souls - and result in mentally and emotionally damaged subhumans.
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I wonder about the chicken-and-egg question. What gave rise to that resentment and fear, in those locations? I can see how it would be self-reinforcing (e.g., the anti-social tendencies of those cultures alienating people from society, making them more negative and more anti-social). But what's harder to figure out is how that ball got rolling.
 
cawacko said:
We spent over $200m on a suicide barrier for the Golden Gate Bridge. How could that be? We’re all so progressive and open minded and non hateful. Why would anyone want to leave this paradise?
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To be clear, nobody is arguing that suicide doesn't exist in places like California. It's just that it's less common -- a rate of 10.5/100k, which is substantially lower than the national average, and well under half the rate of the most suicidal states. The question is why. Some of it may be the urban/rural difference. Suicide rates are higher in rural areas, likely due to social isolation being more of a problem. In urban places like San Francisco --suicide rates in the Bay Area are low even by California standards-- people interact frequently with other humans, making them less likely to sit around on their own brooding.
 
Oneuli said:
I wonder about the chicken-and-egg question. What gave rise to that resentment and fear, in those locations? I can see how it would be self-reinforcing (e.g., the anti-social tendencies of those cultures alienating people from society, making them more negative and more anti-social). But what's harder to figure out is how that ball got rolling.
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I leave it to the professional psychologists to sort out, but my sense is that hating other human beings is actually a manifestation of hating one's self.

I am pretty sure the worst, and most degenerate xenophobes, white nationalists, and racists on this forum actually have issues with self-loathing, low self-esteem, and lack of self respect.
 
reagansghost said:
I believe that's the main reason........conservatives are all reactionaries stuck in the dark past, comes with the territory
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I suppose there may be something about conservatism that correlates with depression. After all, liberals tend to be progressive -- meaning they tend to think progress makes things better. That mindset is inherently hopeful. Even if life sucks at the moment, you assume "it gets better," and that gives you a reason to hold on for a brighter day. But conservatives tend to be reactionaries. They imagine the existence of some golden age in the past, and think the world has been heading to hell in a hand-basket since then. So, they don't have the hope that comes with an "it gets better" assumption. If life sucks today, it's likely to suck even more in a year or two, as more of the traditions that made life sweet are eroded away. From that perspective, it's not hard to see why societies with that attitude might have more of a suicide problem.
 
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Getin the ring said:
It should be obvious to even a casual observer that given the manical, triggered state that liberals have been left in after the Hillary loss, and the fragile minds it left in the wake. A lot of people simply can not live in world with trump as president. They don't know why, there is no reaching them with therapy. So off they go into the black hole.

Shame really
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But it is cons killing themselves, MORON.
 
Getin the ring said:
It should be obvious to even a casual observer that given the manical, triggered state that liberals have been left in after the Hillary loss, and the fragile minds it left in the wake. A lot of people simply can not live in world with trump as president. They don't know why, there is no reaching them with therapy. So off they go into the black hole.

Shame really
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Take a look at the stats. The people in states where Clinton was favored are among the least likely to be suicidal. It's not places like NJ, MA, and NY where people are offing themselves at high rates. Quite the opposite. In places where Clinton was most popular, people seem to be pretty happy. It's in the hard-core Trump states (and, even within those states, the rural Trump counties) that people are suicidally depressed. The question is why. And you see similar trends demographically -- that many of the most suicidal groups of people are the very demographic groups most likely to vote Trump (white people, men, older people, veterans, etc.)
 
CFM said:
Are you claiming correlations equals causation?
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Reread. You'll see that not only is there no such claim, but there's actually a very clear discussion of the fact that we cannot assume one caused the other. If you'd read more carefully, you could engage meaningfully in these threads on the first try, rather than having to have your false starts corrected first.
 
anonymoose said:
.Alaska natives vote dim.
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There's no question that there are going to be counter-trends to the main ones (e.g., aboriginal populations). But, even if we took Alaska out of the calculation, the strong correlation would remain, so clearly there's a lot more going on there.
 
Cypress said:
I leave it to the professional psychologists to sort out, but my sense is that hating other human beings is actually a manifestation of hating one's self.

I am pretty sure the worst, and most degenerate xenophobes, white nationalists, and racists on this forum actually have issues with self-loathing, low self-esteem, and lack of self respect.
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Makes sense, I guess. But while that can explain it on the individual level, it doesn't explain why we see the big geographic trends we see. I mean, it's not like the bitter shits just happened to randomly congregate in some areas and not others. There's something non-random that has given rise to the patterns.
 
Oneuli said:
Take a look at these two blocks of statistics:

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/population-health/us-states-ranked-by-suicide-rate.html
https://morningconsult.com/tracking-trump/

What's remarkable is how strongly correlated suicide rates are with Trump approval rates, at the state level. Specifically, there's a 58.4% positive correlation. Basically, the more suicidally depressed people are in a state, the more likely people in the state are to approve of Trump.

This is particularly interesting because it flies in the face of the normal trend for higher-latitude populations to have higher suicide rates (likely owing to circadian rhythm problems in places where there are huge imbalances between night and day in the Summer and Winter months, resulting in sleep irregularities and depression). Other things being equal, you'd expect lower suicide rates in the Deep South than in New England, just as you find lower suicide rates in southern European countries (Spain, Italy, Greece, Portugal) than northern ones (Norway, Finland, Sweden, Iceland).

So, what's the reason for this correlation? Is there something about conservative politics that makes people suicidal (e.g., skimping on public assistance for mental health care)? Or something about being suicidal that makes people conservative (e.g., the attraction of hateful rhetoric to those who are emotionally frayed)? Or something separate that drives both things (e.g., a sense of being left behind, economically)? Why is it that there's such an enormous gap in suicide rates between places like NJ, NY, and MA (around 8/100k), and places like Montana, Alaska, and Wyoming (around 25/100k)?
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Without bein too glib and not getting too into the weeds. I'm sure all your assumptions are tied together in a depressive or anxious bundle.

REMEMBER, there is a SOLID group fo TRUMP SUPPORTERS who want it to be over. Life. They are ready to meet their maker. The sooner the better. Sadly.
 
Rune said:
But it is cons killing themselves, MORON.
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It sure seems that way, so the poster missed the point pretty badly. However, I'd point out that we can't tell from the data I've seen whether it's the conservative individuals killing themselves more often, or whether it's just those who are within conservative societies who do. That's an important distinction. It's at least conceivable, for example, that although people in Wyoming kill themselves at a high rate, and people in Wyoming tend to be conservative, that it's actually the liberals in Wyoming killing themselves. I suspect not, since suicide rates are also higher among rural people, males, older people, whites, religious people, etc., which all points to suicide being higher among conservatives, but we'd need better data to establish that definitively.
 
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Centerleftfl said:
Without bein too glib and not getting too into the weeds. I'm sure all your assumptions are tied together in a depressive or anxious bundle.

REMEMBER, there is a SOLID group fo TRUMP SUPPORTERS who want it to be over. Life. They are ready to meet their maker. The sooner the better. Sadly.
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That brings up the question of religion, too. I've seen a study showing that suicide attempts and suicide ideation were higher among more religious people. One way to look at it is that the concept of an afterlife makes suicide seem more like escaping into a better world, rather than giving up on their one life. However, I think it's deeper than that. I think that when you build the castle of your value systems on the sands of religion, it's just easier for it to collapse. You have this whole unsound edifice that you inherited, and you start stacking your hopes and dreams on it, and then one day it falls apart and you're left in a state of abject depression. Less religious people don't just inherit that kind of pre-fab value system. They have to construct a system of their own, from the ground up, and that process means their psychological underpinnings get tested, step by step. It may be a slower and more difficult process for erecting meaning in your life, but it leaves you with something more stable and secure to build upon.
 
Oneuli said:
I suppose there may be something about conservatism that correlates with depression. After all, liberals tend to be progressive -- meaning they tend to think progress makes things better. That mindset is inherently hopeful. Even if life sucks at the moment, you assume "it gets better," and that gives you a reason to hold on for a brighter day. But conservatives tend to be reactionaries. They imagine the existence of some golden age in the past, and think the world has been heading to hell in a hand-basket since then. So, they don't have the hope that comes with an "it gets better" assumption. If life sucks today, it's likely to suck even more in a year or two, as more of the traditions that made life sweet are eroded away. From that perspective, it's not hard to see why societies with that attitude might have more of a suicide problem.
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When what you hope for is a crock of shit, that's not progress. Calling it progressive only helps you deal with it better when it fails.
 
Oneuli said:
Reread. You'll see that not only is there no such claim, but there's actually a very clear discussion of the fact that we cannot assume one caused the other. If you'd read more carefully, you could engage meaningfully in these threads on the first try, rather than having to have your false starts corrected first.
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That's why the question was asked. If one doesn't cause the other, there is no reason for you to pretend it does.

As long as the transgenders continue to commit suicide at a rate that currently exists or higher, no problem. Whether correlation/causation occurs or not among those freaks is irrelevant as long as the results are what they are.
 
decline of the white working class. if it's anything.
which is why bringing good paying jobs back like manufacturing under Trump is so hopeful
 
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