Suicide nation

No copycats, thank heavens. Ian Welsh has a great post on the texture of American life called Default to kindness.

It's difficult to have this sort of binocular vision of what was and what is.

This is unsurprising yet still horrifying information.

:(

America is a truly miserable place to live.

I hate to sound touchy-feely, but America does seem to be a place where people are losing hope nowadays. When you feel as though you're on your own and things aren't going to get any better, losing hope is a natural reaction.

It starts off with a wildly inappropriate generalization:

Gail Boledovich, battle schizophrenia for three years and suffer from hallucinations and delusions...She took her own life on May 1, 2005, two days before her 49th birthday. Farhat’s mom could have been anyone’s mom, or aunt — or wife.

Well, no she couldn't be anyone - she could represent anyone suffering from schizophrenia which is not being well controlled with medication. What does this have to do with suicide in the general population? Nothing.

The article goes on to discount the findings of the study which is the focus of the article:

women aged 40-69 are more at risk of killing themselves than other women, according to new research on age-specific suicide rates between 1998 and 2007. In 2007, this age group made up 60 percent of the 7,328 suicides reported among women. ...middle-aged women are one of the fastest-growing populations in the country.

So the study shows that you'll see higher numbers of suicides (or probably anything else) in the largest age group concentration of individuals - naturally, it's baby boomers now age 40-69. In what way is this surprising? A proportional calculation is never done.

Pretty useless, overall. Just another example of bad science writing.