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Suicide is almost as likely cause of your death as a traffic accident. People spend too little effort at preventing traffic accidents, no question about it (all statistics agree that we are getting better at it, just too slowly), but situation is many orders of magnitude worse when it comes to preventing risk of death by suicide. We don't even do routine screening for depression! This total lack of concern is pure madness!!!
My primary method of avoiding suicidal action is to prevent easy access to dangerous weapons, especially guns, and thereby increase the required planning period by orders of magnitude.
I've also heard a suggested rule, "Never commit suicide while drunk," which apparently helped someone, similar to my mother's rule of "no killing each other in the house" for my sibling and I.
This begs the question of what percentage of traffic accident deaths are actually suicide.
There is a discussion on this topic in Cialdini's Influence (which is a great read).
It is very difficult to tell the difference between an accidental traffic accident and a suicidal traffic accident (i.e. purposefully close your eyes and turn the wheel into oncoming traffic). The reason people may commit suicide this way is to avoid the stigma of suicide, avoid hurting their loved ones, and to allow their beneficiaries to receive their life insurance benefits. However some statistical analysis can give us a clue:
There is a trend that when a suicide is committed and covered in the news, there is often a rash of "copy-cat" suicides immediately following. These copy-cats are generally similar to the original in gender, age and style (public v. private, self-only v. murder-suicide, etc) .
The rate of traffic accident deaths ALSO greatly increases following media coverage of a suicide. This suggests that many of these traffic accidents may actually be suicides, but it is possible that there is some other factor (i.e. perhaps hearing about suicides makes people sad, which makes them prone to bad driving).
However, further study reveals that similar to other copy-cat suicides, these traffic accidents also match the original in gender, age, and style. For example, if the original was a murder-suicide, then the copy-cat accidents will take out bystanders (such as by driving into oncoming traffic), but if the original was suicide-only, then the copy-cat accidents will only kill themselves (such as by driving into a pole). This data strongly suggests that these post-suicide "accidents" are actually copy-cat suicides
Therefore, it is much more dangerous to drive or fly after a highly-publicized murder-suicide, fyi.
Note- I do not have my copy in front of me right now, so this is all from memory. But I read it relatively recently, and although I do not recall the exact percentages, am rather certain that this was a confident conclusion.
Most people replying to this comment seem to be assuming that no one is doing anything to prevent suicide. This is wrong. Public schools in the US spend a significant amount of time on suicide awareness and prevention - more time total than for driver's education, I would guess.
I won't dispute that this may not be sufficient or successful, but it is ignorant to assume that no one is trying to prevent suicides.
Well, it depens on where you are. In Ireland too there are lots of PSAs encouraging depressed people to be open about it, hotlines, etc.; on the other hand in Italy I'm not aware of any significant efforts being made to prevent suicides (unless you count trials where when somebody kills themself their teacher is prosecuted of incitement to suicide for having given them bad marks, or things like that (seriously!)).
I didn't know about that. Any research if this is working at all?
Anecdote: The only billboards in town which I enjoy looking at because they stay topical with puns about recent news are those promoting a depression hotline.
It is worth bearing in mind that suicide's a substantial death risk for 18-24s, but I don't really know what an individual can do for themselves to reduce their suicide risk. Move somewhere where there's more lithium in the water?
If we spent 1% of the money per casualty on suicide prevention we spend on cancer prevention we'd know the answer already.
My guess is that screening for depression and other common problems correlating with suicide would be a cheap and easy way to significantly reduce the risk, but our society is insane, and never funded any real research so I have no way of knowing if I'm right.
Or maybe preventing risk of death by suicide is hard. (My roommate killed himself four years ago, so I'd better tap out now.)
The point is not to prevent every single suicide, just reduce its rate. Since nobody is doing anything at the moment, it's pretty reasonable to assume modest effort could have major impact. By comparison we're throwing tons of money on cancer without much success, so throwing more money and effort at it probably won't change much at this point.
Or maybe if you care about reduction of the risk of your death (and risk of your death by suicide), your expected suicide rate is already extremely low.
If you asked people "how likely are you to die by suicide in the next 5 years" I'd expect results order of magnitude below real expected death rate.
It's difficult to imagine what would make you commit suicide, but some thing make people do it all the time.
But the reference class is not the people who said they are unlikely to die by suicide, it's the people who want to reduce their risk of death, by means such as taking driving exams. I'd say strong self preservation prevents suicide.
Do we actually have any statistical basis whatsoever to infer that?
For obvious counterpoint, if depressive realism hypothesis is true, people who are most likely aware of risks are also most likely to be depressed, and most likely to commit suicide at some point in the future. (I have no idea how strong effect this way is).
I'm just suggesting that because the suicides are major risk, doesn't mean that survivalists can do a lot about that risk. Besides, if one is to trust own reasoning in the future one shouldn't try to prevent suicide.
Not so, when I was speculating on all the most effective actions for preventing their own suicide almost none of them were about simply preventing the implementation of a suicide preference. Most involved improving your life in such a way that suicide is not desirable. This allows for trust in your own reasoning. (Enter Buffy, "Give me something to sing about!").
... then one is horribly wrong already. People make wrong decisions all the time for variety of reasons. People do not have utility functions or anything remotely like that. (see Alicorn's Luminosity for entertaining fictional evidence of that, Gianna's transformation in particular)
How do you do about protecting the altered yourself from altered yourself, in the future, though? I sure would try to prevent myself going depressed, and i'd try to keep my cognition working correctly, but that's about it. It is already partial death if you changed too much.
edit: btw i live in the country with #1 suicide rate in the world (lithuania). I knew some guy who was suicidal (edit: he actually ended up in hospital at some occasion, idk if he's still alive even), he was outright weird in general, e.g. cutting himself to show some ultra bitchy gf that he loves her. Single anekdote, I know, but that's how many of the suicides are.
Suicide is a more involved way of dying than traffic accidents. It can easier be avoided for your own person than dying in a car accident.
Edit: i miswrote one 'suicide' instead of the intended 'car accident' and corrected that now
That's illusion of control fallacy.
How so?
Your current self has delusions that it influences your future self's decision to commit suicide far more than it really does.
A survey "are you likely to commit suicide sometime within the next 5 years" will have drastically fewer yes answers than reality.
I seem to refuse to consider suicide as the same type of problem as an accident. But it can not hurt to act to prevent it. Suggestions on what to do about it?
Suggestions based on no research: Do the things which tend to help with depression-- exercise, light in the morning, arguing rationally against thoughts that portray the world or your self as intrinsically bad.
Some of this discussion assumes that suicide is generally irrational. But you can potentially also affect 'rational' suicide.
By avoiding injuries or illnesses that cause a great deal of pain, especially chronic pain. I remember when I had a very painful back problem (now fixed) I read that suicide is unusually common among people with chronic pain.
By avoiding social isolation. There are plenty of things you can do to cultivate a wide and vibrant social life.
This is not as trivial for a depressed person as you make it sound. But I agree with the part about the (ir)rationality of suicide and how this method is preferable to tricking yourself into thinking the world is a nicer place than it may be.
I did not mean to imply it was trivial.
You keep asserting this, but I doubt (not strongly) that it's actually true. There was a good long while, when I was younger, where I was pretty sure I'd commit suicide eventually, but I've since changed my mind.
I may be generalizing from one example, but you're asserting with no examples.
Why did you change your mind?
Some kind of shift in the chemicals in my brain, most likely. No explicit reasoning behind it. Oh, also transhumanism, maybe.
also this