标题: Suicide [打印本页] 作者: choi 时间: 6-30-2013 12:23 标题: Suicide Kim Tingley, I'm Not OK ["Not" crossed out]; Uncovering the self-destructive impulse that many people hide evn from themselves. New York Times Magazine, June 30, 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/3 ... wanted=all&_r=0
(a) Statements in the windows of print:
"How In the United States, more than half of all suicides involve firearms. In fact, suicides account for the greatest number of firearm deaths.
"Where At 23.2 suicides per 100,000 people, Wyoming has the highest rate in the country; New York, at 8 in 100,000, has the lowest. The national average is 12.4.
"Who [paragraph 1] The overall suicide rate has remained 10 and 13 suicides per 100,000 people since World War II. But among soldiers, the rate has risen sharply. In 2004, 10 out of 100,000 soldiers committed suicide; by 2009, it was 23 out of 100,000. [paragraph 2] Men kill themselves 3.7 times as often as women. But women attempt suicide three times as often as men.
(b) Quote:
"Recently more human beings have been dying by suicide annually than by murder and warfare combined. Despite the progress made by science, medicine and mental-health care in the 20th century — the sequencing of our genome, the advent of antidepressants, the reconsidering of asylums and lobotomies — nothing has been able to drive down the suicide rate in the general population. In the United States, it has held relatively steady since 1942. Worldwide, roughly one million people kill themselves every year. Last year, more active-duty US soldiers killed themselves than died in combat; their suicide rate has been rising since 2004. * * * Thomas Frieden, the director of the CDC * * * was saying, keep out of those demographic groups with high suicide rates, which include people with a mental illness like a mood disorder, social isolates and substance abusers, as well as elderly white males, young American Indians, residents of the Southwest, adults who suffered abuse as children and people who have guns handy.
"'We’ve never gone out and observed, as an ecologist would or a biologist would go out and observe the thing you’re interested in for hours and hours and hours and then understand its basic properties and then work from that,' Matthew K Nock, the director of Harvard University’s Laboratory for Clinical and Developmental Research, told me.
"Trying to study what people are thinking before they try to kill themselves is like trying to examine a shadow with a flashlight: the minute you spotlight it, it disappears. * * * Uniquely human, it can’t be observed in other species. And it is impossible to interview anyone who has died by suicide.
"Freud put suicide in the same category as masochism, which he attributed to an aggressively critical superego turning on the self.
"Nock's refusal to accept any wisdom that can't be tested, including seemingly logical notion that simply getting more suicidal peole into treatment would solve the problem, has put him at odds with many clinicians who believe their methods work and that questioning those could cost lives.
(c) My comment:
(i) None of Freud's hypothesese can be tested scientifically, with an experimental group and a control group, for example. That explains in part why Freud has been out of favor in modern world.
(ii) I have been interested in suicide, because Taiwan, like Japan, needs to hold on to every soul (and body) it has, thanks to low birth rates.