Saturday, August 31, 2019

Looking for connections

Science magazine is running a series of reports on suicide, which includes this map for suicide rates in 2017:

On the website version, you can hover over the country and get the exact figure, with Australia showing as 11, the USA as 14, Russia 25, and Greenland at the top of the chart at 51.  (And that's before they heard Trump wanted to buy them.)

What strikes me most is how Muslim countries are all very low.  For example, Pakistan is at 4.44, Bangladesh at 6, but neighbouring India is 15.59.   Saudi Arabia is a startling low 2.9; Indonesia 3.1.

The other consistently low rate countries are those which are very Catholic, particularly those with their own local ethno-Catholicism, like Mexico and the Philippines, as well the European strongholds in Italy and Spain. (France is not so good:  at 12.4 it is close to our rate.)  Mexico surprises me:  for a country so notoriously dangerous for murder, at 5.9, the violence in the form of suicide is about half of ours.

I guess I should note that Buddhist countries are very much a mixed bag - Japan is as high as the US, but other, smaller Buddhist countries are low.  China is quite good at 7.2, too. Not sure what accounts for that.

I have posted before about the pretty well established connection between Protestantism and higher suicide rates, but I don't think I had realised before how being Muslim, or at least, living in a highly Muslim society,  seems to be even more "protective" from suicide than being Catholic.
 

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