Suicides In Norway

There doesn't seem to be evidence that the suicide rates for Sami people and immigrants are different from that of etnic Norwegians. Sounds like a stretch.

 

An extensive 2016 review of 37 studies on the subject in the leading medical journal Lancet : Psychiatry found that almost all studies reported a positive correlation. Suicide and poverty in low-income and middle-income countries: a systematic review - ScienceDirect .. http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/62769/1/__lse.ac.uk_storage_LIBRARY_Secondary_libfile_shared_repository_Content_Iemmi.V_Iemmi_Suicide and poverty_2015.pdf
A study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine of U.S. suicides co-authored by Kerr, Kaplan et al found that suicide rates in the U.S. are strongly correlated to poverty rates.https://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(16)30461-5/fulltext
Russian data show a similar pattern.How Does Income Affect Suicide Rates? Regional evidence from Russia A similar pattern has been found for Europe. Relationship of suicide rates to economic variables in Europe: 2000–2011 | The British Journal of Psychiatry | Cambridge Core As for Norway, there was a steady rise in suicide rates in the 70s and 80s, but a decline after 1990the rates began to decline1970s and 1980s, the rates began to declinearound 1990,about the time antidepressants came into widespread use. https://www.cambridge.org/core/serv..._in_suicide_rates_in_the_nordic_countries.pdf

 

Copy paste.

 

Your inferences from WHO stats are based on the ecological fallacy of using aggregate data for a country data to draw conclusions about relationships involving individuals. Countries don't ordinarily commit suicide. General levels of prosperity in a society tell us little about the behavior of individuals. In fact, according to the sociological theory of relative deprivation, being poor in the midst of plenty intensifies the feeling of being deprived. Relative Deprivation and Deprivation Theory Relative Deprivation and Deprivation Theory Relative deprivation also helps to explain why "people in the poorest countries on earth killing themselves en masse". The feeling of being deprived is relative to comparative reference groups. If everybody in the society is deprived, an individual's sense of being deprived is minimal. Cultural variables also seem to be important, like a high valuing of honor. Cultural Values and the Likelihood of Suicide A number of variable seem to be involved in accounting for the decision to off oneself 15 Common Causes Of Suicide: Why Do People Kill Themselves? Evolutionary psychologists tell us that the will to live is strong in our species, so that suicide is always an exception. But the available research points to a link between poverty and suicide (post # 22)

 

"Countries don't ordinarily commit suicide"

Wow, thanks for sharing. Maybe this is one time you might want to think about what you are posting rather than just saying the opposite of what VG says

 

Wow, nice deflection!

 

So white people are killing themselves because they have to live with Muslims. Is that what you are saying?

Nonsense

Just because you have good pay and social safety nets it does not mean you are not depressed. Some of kids in smaller towns in Norway have to travel an hour to school and go to class with the same 3 people for all of their education. It's probably isolation like that which feeds the depression. Who can you talk to if your classmates are an ass? Norwegians are known to be shy anyway. It's a culture of only telling close friends your life.

 

Eyeballing the data suggests the situation may be more complicated than that. The top ten include four developing Third World countrie--hardly among "the wealthier countries": Guyana, Suriname, Kazakhstan, and Lesotho.Equatorial Guinea is in the top 20. Guyana has a high poverty rate: 36% living in poverty and !8% living in extreme poverty.The youth unemployment rate is around 40%. Suriname is currently in steep economic recession, with 70% of the population loving below the poverty line. In Lesotho, 57% of the population lives in extreme poverty, and suffers from an AIDS epidemic. In Kazakhstan , a former Soviet Republic, nearly half the population is considered to be low income, living on $70 a month. Beyond the mere level of poverty--economic volatility resulting from extractive economies, leaving the population particularly vulnerable during economic downturns is a source of anxiety and depression. Increases in economic inequality, measured by the Gini index, can also explain a growing sense of relative deprivation that could turn suicidal. These are particularly high for Lesotho (54.2), Guyana (44.5), Russia (37.7), Lithuania (37.70), South Korea (36), and Latvia (35.10) which are all in the top 20 for suicide.

The suicide rates of the other countries may be governed by factors other than economics. Durkheim's classic Suicide (1897) offered a sociological analysis of the phenomenon, in which he identified four basic types: anomic suicide, in countries undergoing rapid change and destabliization destructive of social ties; egoistic suicide, resulting from individualistic self-absorption, typical of liberal industrial democracies like those of Scandanavia; altruistic suicide, motivated by self-sacrifice, exemplified by suicide bombers: and fatalistic suicide, brought on by situations of hopelessness. Your list contains examples of several of these. Lastly, there are important cultural variables to consider, which I will after I get some sleep.

 

Now about those cultural variables. Culture--i.e., shared values in how suicide is viewed in a community or the expectations that a community has of members that can be sources of stress or impact self-esteem--are important variables in suicide rates. The prevalence of an honor-shame culture is one major variable that is statistically related to suicide. Cultural Values and the Likelihood of Suicide There are several distinct variants of this: the Latin and Islamic pattern tending more to external aggression to vindicate honor, the Asian and Western pattern turning it inward by suicide. The Asian pattern, with its notion of "saving face", is notorious in this regard, and has been formalized in the Japanese samurai Bushido tradition of ritual hara-kiri. It isn't surprising, then, to find Japan among the top twenty. South Korea is among the top ten for similar reasons: suicides by the elderly who don't want to burden their families with their care and suicides by the young under strong pressure for academic and professional achievement to meet their parents high expectations and not to dishonor them by failure. In the west, shame tends to take the form of low self-esteem resulting from failure to meet cultural expectations of individual achievement, and is closely related to Durkheim's egoistic pattern of suicide. Another aspect is an emphasis on holding in emotion and keeping problems to oneself. The Nordic countries are notorious for this; Garrison Keillor made a career of satirizing stolid Minnesota Lutherans and Norwegian bachelor farmers. Scandanavians aren't religious anymore, but the austerity continues. People are expected to keep their problems to themselves and deal with them.

One additional variable that needs to be added to the list is availability of means. Switzerland is among the top twenty for suicides. Switzerland is one of the more prosperous countries in the world, and one of the happiest, in terms of those surveys. But it has the second highest suicide rate in western Europe, and the highest rate of suicides committed with guns.Switzerland’s troubling record of suicide Switzerland is also unique in its liberal legislation concerning the right to die and the availability of firearms. The Swiss Have Liberal Gun Laws, Too Unlike the U.S., the Swiss are more inclined to use the firearms on themselves than others, pointing to a cultural difference. In developing countries like Guyana, where firearms are less available, there is easy access to poisonous pesticides and weed killers, which are the weapons of choice.

Getting back to Norway, The incidence of suicide in Norway is similar to western Europe, North America and Australia. Like the other "happy" Scandanavian welfare states, it faces the environmental challenges of gloomy, harsh winters and the cultural challenge of an austere secularized Lutheran outlook that tends to isolate people emotionally. In Durkehim's terminology, suicides tend to be of the egoistic pattern, reflecting a postmodern culture of secular individualism. There was a steep upswing in suicides in the 1970s and 1980s, but a decline after 1990, coinciding with increased use of antidepressants. There has been a recent epidemic of youth suicides. As the OP points out, there are far more people who die of suicides than accidents. Obviously, not everyone is happy in Norway. It can be particularly miserable to be unhappy in a land of supposedly happy people, because of the gap between expectations and achievement. Besides, the simplistic assumption that satisfaction of material wants is sufficient for human happiness goes against Maslow's need hierarchy.Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: the pyramid of happiness

 

The study was published in 2010 (but used 1990 data)
http://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/files/wp07-12bk.pdf

The study was not based on San Francisco. Rather, the study was conducted by researchers from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, and the US Census Bureau.

That's the only study I was able to find that specified income levels. Maybe there's something more recent out there.

There's more recent data cited in Case and Deaton's Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century (published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences).

Here's a link
https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/112/49/15078.full.pdf

Table 1, on page 3 of the PDF (page 15080 of the proceedings) gives data on suicide rates for white non-hispanics, aged 45-54, by education level in 2013. Those with a high school degree or less died by intentional self-harm at a rate of 38.8 per 100,000, whereas those with a BA or higher had a rate of 16.2 per 100,000.

There's more to suicide rates than just income level, but within demographic categories, poverty seems to generally increase rates of suicide.

 

❤️

 

Causes for the high suicide rates seems to be loneliness, addiction to prescription drugs and alcohol as per the below article.

Is suicide more common in the Nordics?

I actually find the likes of Norwegian explorers and sportsmen like Roald Amundsen and chess king Magnus Carlsen very inspiring.

There is a superb Norwegian proverb I am fond of quoting...

“Det finnes ikke dårlig vær, bare dårlig klær!” which translates to “There is no bad weather, only bad clothes!”.

Hopefully, the spirited Norwegians will address this issue with the appropriate remedies.

 

See what a Socialist country does for it's people; mental health care and social support actually mitigates suicides and depression.