Ordinary Nothing

I noticed this lovely Guardian article talking about how according to WHO statistics "Europe is world’s suicide hotspot".

The article of course doesn’t mention Israel, so it wasn’t clear if we’re considered Europe or Asia for this purpose.
So off I went to the WHO website (They have a special, and large, suicide related area. How sad is that?), and looked at the statistics myself.

In the global comparison table, suicide rates here are higher than some countries, but are indeed lower than the scary levels of most west-European countries.

But it’s very hard to make anything from the data. What’s available on the site is PDF files. The data is collected over different years, and the PDF means it’s not easy to run any cross sections, sort the data, or whatever… I certainly don’t care enough, or am bored enough, to do hard manual work and check this for myself.

Personally, I’m not about the commit suicide in the foreseeable future, so there’s no urgency…

I am curious as to why suicide rates here are lower, though. Sociological theories related to suicide (well, the few ones that I actually came across. Really not my field, or area of interest) would suggest this indicate people here are happier, or that the population here is more cohesive. And I must say, they’re not, and it isn’t.
On the other hand, this is one mystery that I don’t feel any crucial imperative to explore…

February 14th, 2005 at 12:43 EET | Categories: Culture, Science | Track comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.