Suicide is on the rise for young Americans, with no clear answers
Suicide is on the rise for young Americans, with no clear answers
With young people like college student Ben Salas dying, families and experts are searching for answers.
I mean, {gestures broadly at everything}
with no clear answers
I can think of a few...
Livable wages, shorter hours, affordable housing, universal healthcare, cities designed around social interaction rather than everyone stuck in their cars all the time so people can actually make friends, less police violence, not being worried about getting shot on campus on the way to chem class...
It all boils down to cost of living. Housing, healthcare, food, utilities, everything has gotten so expensive because capitalists said so, and now even working harder than before yields less than it did prepandemic. I work 50-60 hour weeks (my own choice, independent electrical contractor) and make pretty good money while keeping my prices somewhat reasonable, but my accounts just simply drain. It's infuriating.
I think that cost of living is a huge part of it, but another huge part of it is loneliness. We've become a society where no one talks to each other. Everyone is sealed off in their own little bubble- in their homes, in their cars, and if, god forbid, they have to walk, wearing earbuds. Sure, you can talk online like we're doing, but that's not the same thing at all.
Society should serve human nature, human nature shouldn't change to serve society.
People suicide where they feel alienated, and like they're not served by the social functions and contracts that are in place.
Basically where they don't like the life that's on offer.
Then we lie to them and tell them "it will get better" to get them off the ledge solely to try to squeeze a little more productivity out of them for the owners before they realize "but society cares about you" was just yet another layer of bullshit by a civilization that's been warped and perverted to serve the singular goal of "make the wealth class wealthier" at literally all expense, even the very air we all breathe.
A poor person begging for help will just get a 72 hour hold, some generic pills tossed at them to dull their mind, and even more debt for begging for help, where a wealthy sociopath that exploits thousands including that poor person will get all the mental health assistance they desire up to and including self-actualization and strategies to mitigate any wealth guilt when they should very much feel guilty for exploiting others and hoarding more than they would need for several gluttonous lifetimes when struggling people exist.
The Covid pandemic could be a contributing factor, says Dr Christine Crawford, a psychiatrist and associate medical director at the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
Ffs. The chart included with the article shows that suicide rates dropped during Covid, and are just now returning to the same (linear) climbing rates we’ve seen since 2000. That’s not how you establish a causal model.
Man, I was talking to my wife about just this topic only moments ago. What does today’s youth have to look forward to? Jobs, politics, climate? We don’t even let them have a seat at the table and it’s their future. My conclusion: Humans are self-absorbed ass holes and it will be our undoing.
I strongly disagree with humans being self absorbed assholes. Capitalism promotes humans being self absorbed greedy assholes.
There are plenty of excellent examples of humans being selfless and working together in spite of a corrupt self-absorbed system.
The world is going to shit right no and a lot of stuff feels hopeless and like we have nothing to look forward to, but if we give up on our fellow humans then who can we work with to pull the world out of all this shit?
Uh huh. So you blame “capitalism” and not the people who invented it? Not the people who continue to put it above all else? To weaken restrictions in the name of more money and power for themselves? So we just need some magical construct to protect us from ourselves then I suppose… Because we aren’t the issue!
Oh gee I wonder what the fucking answer might be
They won't find the answers if they aren't in the position to ask the right questions.
Celebrated Greed and permitted rule by private shareholder PARASITES that do nothing yet demand and get almost everything humanity produces are destroying civilization, humanity, and oh yeah the habitability of our only communal environment that will take millions of years to correct once the problem, us, are no longer around to keep making it worse eyes wide open.
Economies are supposed to exist as lowly tools to efficiently and equitably distribute goods and services for the benefit of the society said economy serves. publicly traded companies don't even care about their customers/products/services anymore, just whatever accounting fuckery and self-cannibalism(layoffs, monopolistic price gouging for inferior products having murdered the competition, tax cheats, etc) will goose the next quarter for the activist shareholders telling them to burn everything for a short term stock bump fire sale, with no sustainable business model that actually benefits society. HBODiscoveryTimeWarnerblahblah comes to mind, but it's happening in every economic sector, including the ones with life and death consequences.
Instead most developed nation states will sacrifice anything to protect their beloved
societyeconomy.We're doomed because even most of the people that suffer from this aren't even willing to admit it out of the sunk cost fallacy. The owners know what they're doing, they just don't care about the societies they came from or any future after them, and they're the ones in charge.
If we cared about the well being of our species at fucking all, we would have to acknowledge as a species that capitalism and the concept of infinite growth/metastasis on a finite world is over and we need to pursue a multigenerational goal of shrinking humanity's footprint to a level our only fish bowl can support, and to instead seek HOMEOSTASIS with the world we conquered, saturated, poisoned, and are still actively beating the shit out of to grow the ego scores of a few thousand sociopath families.
Honestly I'm surprised suicides are still as low as they are, they're going to get worse, because most people, and especially the people in the owner class either refuse to or delude themselves into not even acknowledging the obvious root cause, which would be step 0 to there being any hope at all.
Society shouldn't even tolerate insatiable avarice. We not only celebrate it, we deify it. We make our most successfully, destructively greedy people celebrities, and write articles about how we should emulate the sick, sociopathic fucks. Gordon Gecko should be no one's role model, but here we are.
It's not just the youth. The numbers for the older has risen significantly as well.
The world is no longer geared to support its people in meaningful ways, so many cant see a way forward
Dealing with a great shitty reality comes with a great responsibility..
Climate change, we have like 2-10 years left as things currently stand per top leading scientists....