alt Hacker NewsUsing suicide rates as a measure for population happiness is very peculiar, given that the people who commit suicide represent fractions of a percent, and would only ever sum up to a rounding error.
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RamblingCTO • yesterday at 7:13 AM
QoL certainly has its effect on suicide rates. I assume that life is the shittier, the more people opt to leave on their own terms. Just look at russia, absolute shithole and it's on rank 11.
If people are happy, you have less suicides. I don't need a study for that.
It's not that peculiar if you assume all countries follow the same type of happiness distribution that is simply shifted/stretched lower or higher.
Then, the relative size of a bottom or top absolute threshold is highly meaningful. Even if it's a fraction of a percent, populations are huge and suicide rates are not rounding errors at all -- they're actually quite statistically significant.
And as macabre as it is, suicides are objective facts mostly unaffected by methodology, and unaffected by translation issues, cultural differences, etc.
This is why suicide rates are actually a powerful mental health statistic, just like height is a powerful physical health statistic, at the population level. There's obviously still a lot both of these metrics don't say, but the fact that they are highly objective makes them extremely valuable.