Posts Tagged ‘U.S’
Posted on January 22, 2010 - by David
Crazy Like Us, Part 2: PTSD in Sri Lanka
Chapter 2 – The Wave that Brought PTSD to Sri Lanka
In chapter 2 of his new book, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche, Ethan Watters describes the wave of research and treatment professionals that swept in to Sri Lanka in the wake of the 2004 tsunami, hoping to both heal and study the abundance of psychologically scarred people they expected to see. According to the varying estimates of experts quoted in news articles, anywhere from 15 to 90 percent of the population might be suffering from post traumatic stress disorder.
And did they find this many Sri Lankans suffering from what we call PTSD? The answer seems to be no, but the certainty with which Western professionals entered the supposed psychological disaster zone seems to have made it hard for them to accept what they found. Watters cites the example of a trauma counselor interviewed on BBC radio who was worried by the fact that the children in the village he was working in were more eager to get back to school than to talk about their frightening experiences. His explanation was that they were “clearly in denial.” (77)
Watters is obviously critical of this dogmatic belief that all minds in all cultures are equally susceptible to mental illness. The idea, introduced in the first chapter on anorexia and further developed here, that more traditional cultures do not suffer the way that Westerners do, deserves special attention. By providing meaning and identity through religious beliefs and closely integrated social groups, it seems that traditional cultures avoid the specifically modern forms of mental illness that many in the West assume to be universal. In her research following the tsunami, Dr. Gaithri Fernando, a psychology professor at Cal State University and a native of Sri Lanka, found that in place of the psychological symptoms westerners would expect to see, many who lost loved ones and homes experienced physical symptoms of aches and muscle pains. Without the Western, dualist conception of mind-body split, it seems Sri Lankans felt the pain of loss in their bodies rather than their minds.
As Watters points out in the first chapter, specifically modern forms of mental illness seem to be related to the importance of individual identity and independence in Western societies. Dr. Fernando’s research suggests this difference is key to understanding the conspicuous absence of PTSD.
… Sri Lankans tended to see the negative consequences of an event like the tsunami in terms of the damage it did to social relationships. Those who continued to suffer long after a horrible experience, her research showed, were those who had become isolated from their social network or who were not fulfilling their role in kinship groups. In short, they conceived of the damage done by the tsunami as occurring not inside their mind but outside the self, in the social environment. (91)
If social integration and strong cultural beliefs are key to protecting the individual mind from turmoil, then the lack of these would presumably lead to problems. In looking at where the PTSD diagnosis began, Watters goes back to the Vietnam War and the difficulties of many soldiers upon returning home. “Beliefs that had sustained many of their fathers in World War II were suddenly insufficient and meaningless to these soldiers,” he writes (121). I believe this cultural insufficiency may help to explain why an estimated 300,000 American veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are now suffering from PTSD.
In a study published this week in the Journal of Neural Engineering, researchers at the Minneapolis VA Medical Center expressed excitement upon finding that by scanning the brain using magnetoencephalography (MEG), they were able to confirm with 90% accuracy the PTSD diagnoses of 74 American vets. The article that summarizes the findings states that “the ability to objectively diagnose PTSD is the first step towards helping those afflicted with this severe anxiety disorder.” However, all the study did was confirm “objectively” that the “subjective” diagnoses of these soldiers were already fairly accurate. Brain scans do little to explain why veterans today seem to be suffering psychological battle scars at a much higher rate than ever before in U.S history. Could it be the lack of strong cultural belief in what they are doing over there? The ambiguity of the enemy? The possibility that many of these young veterans may have chosen the identity of soldier not merely because of pride and patriotism, but because other paths in life seemed closed to them? The fact that despite the horror of war, the social integration provided during active duty surpasses what they might experience at home? The lesson to be taken out of Watters chapter on PTSD seems to be that the suffering of these veterans cannot be explained by some scientific correspondence between brain malfunction and the horrific events they witnessed and experienced. Is it crazy to think that the inability of American culture to provide a solid identity for soldiers that holds up at home as well as abroad, and the contradictory messages that simultaneously value and vilify the work that they do might be partly to blame for the widespread mental devastation?
A brief article in which Watters highlights some of the main points of this chapter was written in 2007 and is available here.
Posted on January 21, 2010 - by David
Crazy Like Us, Part 1: Anorexia in Hong Kong
Last week, after reading Ethan Watters’ article in the New York Times, I picked up his new book, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche. The basic argument goes something like this:
- Mental illness is not the same in all cultures, nor has its expression remained constant within individual cultures over time.
- Because of the importance of science in Western culture, the biochemical disease model of mental illness is now accepted, almost without question, as scientific fact.
- The Diagnostic criteria that come from the DSM definitions of mental illnesses have been aggressively exported to “developing nations,” effectively changing the cultural expression of mental illness and eroding local modes of healing.
- Despite all our science and wealth, sufferers in more traditional, less “developed” nations still seem to fare better in terms of course and severity of illness than we Americans do. It seems that the particularly American “hyperindividualism” and the lack of meaningful social integration do not make for healthy minds.
The book has four chapters, each treating a different mental illness in a different culture. Anorexia in Hong Kong, PTSD in Sri Lanka, Schizophrenia in Zanzibar, and Depression in Japan. All four chapters raise important questions about the relationship between mental illness and modern culture, so I’ll be devoting a post to each one.
The Rise of Anorexia in Hong Kong
I find it particularly interesting that despite the prominence of the biomedical explanation of mental illness, the commonsense understanding of anorexia implies that culture is to blame. As Watters writes:
Most assume that anorexia, with its attendant fear of fatness and body dysmorphic disorder, is born of a peculiar modern fixation with a slender, female body type, and that popular culture transmits this fetish to young women. (11)
While Watters points out that in many ways, Hong Kong was already primed with Western culture and its attendant messages about body image, as of the 1980’s, cases of self-starvation were extremely rare, and the specifically Western version was nowhere to be found. Watters’ main source for the chapter, Dr. Sing Lee, found that the few women he encountered who were unwilling to eat knew that they were underweight and expressed no fear of getting fat. Instead, they tended to complain of stomach pain and sadness.
So when did anorexia as we know it appear in Hong Kong? Watters and Dr. Lee trace this back to the highly publicized death of Charlene Hsu Chi-Ying, a skeletally thin 14-year-old girl who dropped dead on a busy Hong Kong street in November of 1994. In attempting to understand and explain what went wrong with Charlene, “Chinese reporters looked to Western sources and experts,” and the culture was quickly infused with the language of the DSM and the Western “symptom pool” of anorexia. Informative campaigns were soon launched, and new, western-looking cases of anorexia began showing up more and more frequently at doctors’ offices.
Clearly, Watters is attempting to demonstrate how the introduction of an official diagnosis and all its attendant symptoms has a direct impact on the way an illness is expressed. He traces the development of the “anorexia nervosa” diagnosis in the late 19th century and notes the increase in number of cases and homogeneity of symptoms as the new illness gained recognition. He also sees the 20th century feminist movement and highly publicized celebrity cases of anorexia as expanding the reach of this disorder. Watters turns to medical historian Edward Shorter to explain why a cultural awareness of a new disease model actually shapes the experience of individual sufferers:
People at a given moment in history in need of expressing their psychological suffering have a limited number of symptoms to choose from – a “symptom pool” as he calls it. When someone unconsciously latches onto a behavior in the symptom pool, he or she is doing so for a very specific reason: the person is taking troubling emotions and internal conflicts that are often indistinct or frustratingly beyond expression and distilling them into a symptom or behavior that is a culturally recognized signal of suffering.
If it is true that the way distressed individuals express their suffering is influenced by modern, Western cultural models of mental illness, my question is, what is causing the number of distressed individuals in places like Hong Kong to grow? I believe the evidence Watters gives in this chapter begins to hint at the answer. He references the work of Clark University professor Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, who sees the Western emphasis on individual identity and independence as the primary cause of the turbulence of adolescence:
“If it is true that cultural values of individualism lie at the heart of adolescent storm and stress,” Arnett concludes, “it seems likely that adolescence in traditional cultures will become more stormy and stressful … as the influence of the West increases.”(40)
Watters again turns to Dr.Lee, who “believes that stress from the rapid social changes occurring in Hong Kong led to a “general loading of psychopathology” within the population.”(52)
This “stress from rapid social changes” fits Liah Greenfeld’s definition of anomie. As Hong Kong experienced these modern changes, traditional sources of identity were weakening, resulting in a condition of cultural insufficiency. Greenfeld’s work on mental illness suggests that problems with identity formation are caused by this chronic condition of cultural insufficiency, (anomie), which characterizes modern culture.
Therefore, it seems Watters might agree that as a culture moves towards modernity, the number of people experiencing crises of identity which ultimately result mental illness will increase. The question that remains for me is, in determining the source of specific expressions of mental illness in “developing” nations, how can we separate the influence of the introduction of Western diagnostic models from the influence of modern culture in general?
Posted on January 12, 2010 - by David
Is America’s Idea of Mental Illness Making the World Sicker?
A friend of mine sent me a link to this New York Times article by Ethan Watters, The Americanization of Mental Illness. Watters is critical of the way the American understanding of mental illness, (the biomedical model which treats mental illness as a disease like any other) , has been exported to nations around the world, stamped as scientific fact, and been deemed the only reasonable, modern way to understand these distressing phenomena. He argues that mental illness is not the same in every culture and time period, and that by spreading our interpretation of it, we are making the world sicker:
“For more than a generation now, we in the West have aggressively spread our modern knowledge of mental illness around the world. We have done this in the name of science, believing that our approaches reveal the biological basis of psychic suffering and dispel prescientific myths and harmful stigma. There is now good evidence to suggest that in the process of teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we’ve been exporting our Western “symptom repertoire” as well. That is, we’ve been changing not only the treatments but also the expression of mental illness in other cultures. Indeed, a handful of mental-health disorders — depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anorexia among them — now appear to be spreading across cultures with the speed of contagious diseases. These symptom clusters are becoming the lingua franca of human suffering, replacing indigenous forms of mental illness.”
He cites examples from around the world where the expression of a mental illness has visibly changed after exposure to the western understanding. While Watters doesn’t deny the reality of these illnesses, he wants to bring culture back into the discussion. He seems to believe that the introduction of a new “symptom repertoire” changes the possibilities of how an illness can be expressed:
“This does not mean that these illnesses and the pain associated with them are not real, or that sufferers deliberately shape their symptoms to fit a certain cultural niche. It means that a mental illness is an illness of the mind and cannot be understood without understanding the ideas, habits and predispositions — the idiosyncratic cultural trappings — of the mind that is its host.”
While I would agree that exposure to modern American culture is likely to change the way mental illness appears in a particular culture, I think Watters is claiming that it is the American interpretation more than American culture itself that is causing the changes. Still, Watters accurately points out that historically, mental illnesses have not been the same culture to culture, or even within the same culture over time. He refers to research which shows that “people with schizophrenia in developing countries appear to fare better over time than those living in industrialized nations.” I think this gets to the heart of the matter:
“These findings have been widely discussed and debated in part because of their obvious incongruity: the regions of the world with the most resources to devote to the illness — the best technology, the cutting-edge medicines and the best-financed academic and private-research institutions — had the most troubled and socially marginalized patients.”
This kind of data seems to confirm Liah Greenfeld’s hypothesis. She believes that modern culture interferes with the process of identity formation and in turn, causes mental illness. Some of the people involved in the research Watters refers to believe that the higher degree of social integration in developing nations may aid in preventing relapse of illness. The contrast between the source of identity in more traditional societies, (more closely integrated social groups which provide meaning), and American society (the view that “individuals are captains of their own destiny”) is brought to the forefront of the discussion. Watters ends the article lamenting that “when we undermine local conceptions of the self and modes of healing, we may be speeding along the disorienting changes that are at the very heart of much of the worlds distress.”
Ethan Watters new book, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche, is in stores today.
Posted on January 6, 2010 - by David
The “Postmodern” Emergent Church
Going off a suggestion given in one of the comments to my post Is Postmodernity a Reality?, I began looking at what “postmodernism” means to Christians in America. A quick youtube search revealed a surprising number of videos related to Christianity.
In this short video, professors from various Christian colleges attempt to define postmodernism.
If modernism, which involves the exaltation of human reason and elevation of science over faith, is the “tower of babel trying to reach up and replace God,” then postmodernism is “the babel that came after that when people lost the ability to communicate because there’s no common language or presuppositions” says Angus Menuge, chair of philosophy at Concordia University. “So you get fragmentation, people pulled in different directions, even the same person pulled in different directions.”
I believe this “fragmentation” he refers to is likely related to the anomie which Greenfeld considers to be a built-in feature of modernity. But the main concern here seems to be relativism and “suspicion of truth claims,” or to use the phrase of French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard which they refer to, “incredulity towards metanarratives.” The Evangelical leaders in this next video are worried about the same thing. The first speaker, Al Mohler, says that the meat of postmodernism is the belief that truth is socially constructed and therefore relative, it is not knowable, and cannot be transmitted through language. “All the rest of it’s really decoration.”
It’s obvious that these men have a real problem with some of the prevailing attitudes of secular culture, but the real “danger” they are railing against here is a particular brand of Christianity – the “emerging” or “emergent” church – which they see embracing the secular “postmodern” culture. This clip from a PBS documentary gives a snapshot of this movement and some of the objections to it.
It is not surprising to me that this version of church is gaining popularity. I think for many Americans it may seem more relevant because it operates on the principle of egalitarianism which is already an essential part of our national identity. Everyone’s opinion matters, everyone can participate. Furthermore, the focus is clearly shifted off of eternity, (questions of heaven and hell ), to how life on earth can be improved. As Brian McLaren states in the PBS documentary, “if we have a version of the Christian faith that does not make us the kind of people that make this a better world, we really want no part in it.” This shift in focus seems to line up pretty closely with the secular and humanistic consciousness of modern culture as defined by Liah Greenfeld. While the emergent church keeps God in the picture, life on earth is considered “ultimately meaningful,” and “within this world the most significant element is the people who populate it.”
In this sense, the emergent movement does involve a kind of embrace of the so-called “postmodern” culture, so it’s not surprising that the more fundamental evangelical leaders consider it a threat. In their eyes, it is eliminating many of the crucial aspects of the Christian identity to blend in with the secular culture surrounding it.
Posted on December 30, 2009 - by David
Busyness in America
In the “busy” spirit of the season, I share with you this essay by Liah Greenfeld, published in 2005 in Social Research, on busyness in contemporary American society. By comparing the lives of Americans today with life in other historical and some contemporary societies, she argues that the sense of busyness we experience is not actually caused by how much we have to do:
We are busy not because our physical and economic survival requires constant exertion on our part, leaving us little opportunity for spiritual restoration–relaxing, getting rid of the sense of busyness–but because we are incapable of perceiving and taking advantage of the opportunities for repose. We are restless. And our busyness is an expression of this inability to rest, rather than its cause. Much of our busyness comes from our leisure activities, in fact: preparations for and participation in family gatherings, holiday shopping (how often every one of us heard–or exclaimed–the desperate “Oh my! It is December 15, and I have not yet done my Christmas shopping!”), visits to the hairdresser and the gym; the phrase itself, “leisure activities,” is telling. We regard all these occasions for relaxation as duties and external pressures: we exercise not because we like it and can afford to indulge ourselves, but because one must keep in shape. We read New York Times over breakfast because one must be informed; go to concerts, movies, and dinners with friends because it is important to be culturally au currant and sociable. We are veritably torn into pieces by all these simultaneous and necessarily conflicting demands that oppress us every minute of our waking life and eventually invade our sleep.
So, if work conditions have improved and hours have gotten shorter, if quality of live has risen steadily and our options for relaxation and entertainment are constantly expanding, why do so many of us feel busy to the point of anxiety and exhaustion? Greenfeld claims that in distinction to past societies:
Americans who suffer from busyness today do not prioritize. They treat all their occupations– work, family, and even leisure–as equally important…
This disturbing inability to prioritize, which is the direct, proximate, cause of our oppressive sense of busyness, is undoubtedly related to the difficulty modern men and women, Americans above all, have forming their identities.
As in her other work, Greenfeld states here that the problem of identity formation stems from the anomie which comes as a built-in feature of modern culture, which is organized around the principles of popular sovereignty and egalitarianism. These principles, which open wide a world of possibilities, also fundamentally change the way identity is formed, because we must now create for ourselves what was once provided to us by culture:
Modern culture cannot provide us with a sense of order because its constitutive beliefs and attitudes, its supreme values and norms, consistently undermine order…
To insist on the fundamental equality of members in a community is to leave them fundamentally undefined vis-à-vis each other, to leave them without an identity. To proclaim and defend popular sovereignty and the individual’s freedom to make oneself is to demand that each one construct one’s identity on one’s own. Lifting limits from our desires, paradoxically, places very heavy burdens on our shoulders.
For me, this explanation rings true. I seem to feel busy all of the time, whether working, in the car with a junior bacon cheeseburger in one hand and my cell phone in the other, or just sitting on the couch in sweatpants with a book and a cup of coffee. I’ve asked myself again and again recently, how can I possibly be so busy and have so little to show for it? While I haven’t pinned down one identity for myself yet, I know that I can do a better job of prioritizing and actually relaxing when that’s what the moment calls for.
So, take a break from this sensation of busyness, enjoy the long weekend, and have a happy new year.
Posted on December 24, 2009 - by David
A Very Merry American Christmas
Since some of my recent posts have dealt with religion in America, and considering that tomorrow is Christmas, I was curious to see how this holiday has been officially represented in recent years. I found these “messages on the observance of Christmas” from 1984-2008 on the American Presidency Project website.
Ronald Reagan: 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988
George H. Bush: 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992
Bill Clinton: 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000
George W. Bush: 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008
Honestly, I was surprised at the explicitly Christian content of most of the messages. I guess I was expecting a more general message emphasizing tradition, family, and some of those “Christmas values” – peace, love, goodwill, etc.- with the religious aspect slightly toned down.
Of course, the Christmas story is always connected to the story of the nation. Most of messages are structured similarly, with something about the birth of Jesus as a gift from God and the message Jesus brought to the world, followed by some statement about how America continues to work for the ideals of peace on earth and freedom for all mankind.
It wasn’t until 2000, Clinton’s last Christmas in the White House, that any mention of other religion’s holidays was made:
For Americans of many faiths, this is a season of renewal–of light shining through the darkness, of despair transformed to hope. This year, Christmas is celebrated during the same week as Jews celebrate Hanukkah and Muslims celebrate the Eid Al-Fitr–a powerful and moving reminder that followers of the three Abrahamic faiths share fundamental values: a reverence for our Creator, a belief in human dignity, and a conviction that we must love our neighbors as ourselves. By building on these shared values, we can create a future where all God’s children live together in peace and understanding.
In 2001, George W. Bush, perhaps hesitant to offend or exclude anyone only a few months after 9/11, spoke only of what “Christians believe,” lacking the confident, matter-of-fact tone of Reagan and his father:
According to the Gospel of Luke, two thousand years ago, the savior of mankind came into the world. Christians believe that Jesus’ birth was the incarnation of God on earth, opening the door to new hope and eternal life. At Christmastime, Christians celebrate God’s love revealed to the world through Christ. And the message of Jesus is one that all Americans can embrace this holiday season–to love one another.
There are these kind of occasional qualifications. Clinton, began most of his messages with “warm greetings to everyone celebrating Christmas,” which reads to me like a kind of disclaimer against offending Americans who don’t celebrate Christmas.
Earlier today, Barack and Michelle Obama gave a Christmas message which was much lighter on religious content, focusing more on the sacrifices of U.S military personnel and what we can do to help. Still, he did mention among the reasons to celebrate this Christmas, “a message of peace and brotherhood that continues to inspire more than 2,000 after Jesus’ birth.”
I don’t know. It seems to me that 364 days of the year, and even on Christmas day, most of the nation pays no mind to the story of Jesus’s birth, so this has left me scratching my head.
I guess I’ll just echo the words of George W. Bush: “I send greetings to those celebrating Christmas.”
Posted on December 18, 2009 - by David
The Happiest States?
A study published this week in the journal Science found ‘objective’ confirmation that self-reported levels of happiness for U.S states are accurate. According to this overview of the findings, the “objective indicators” of happiness were drawn from a 2003 study published by Stuart Gabriel which included data from each state on factors such as “precipitation; temperature; wind speed; sunshine; coastal land; inland water; public land; National Parks; hazardous waste sites; environmental ‘greenness’; commuting time; violent crime; air quality; student-teacher ratio; local taxes; local spending on education and highways; cost of living.”
Here is the list of the top ten happiest states. I’ve added a few things to think about for some of them.
- Lousiana- #1 murder rate (excluding D.C) # 4 violent crime rate (2007). #2 infant mortality rate (2005) #45 median household income (2007). #2 persons below poverty level (2007) #46 in education (2006-2007)
- Hawaii- #49 in education (2006-2007)
- Florida- #5 violent crime rate (excluding D.C)(2007)
- Tennessee- #2 violent crime rate (excluding D.C)(2007)
- Arizona- #1 property crime rate (excluding D.C)(2007)
- Mississippi- #1 infant mortality rate (2005) #2 Unemployment rate (2007) #50 median household income (2007). # 1 persons below poverty level (2007) #50 in education (2006-2007)
- Montana
- South Carolina- # 1 violent crime rate(2007). #3 infant mortality rate (2005)
- Alabama- #47 in education (2006-2007)
- Maine
Andrew Oswald, author of the report, “expressed some caution in how the results should be interpreted for the state of Louisiana in the survey following the disruption caused by Hurricane Katrina,” but I’m pretty sure the statistics I’ve included are consistent with the rankings before Katrina. I quickly gathered my data here:
crime: FBI Uniform Crime Report 2007
education: ALEC Report Card on American Education
infant mortality, unemployment, persons below poverty level, median household income: U.S Census Bureau 2010 Statistical Abstract
Posted on December 11, 2009 - by David
It’s the least suicidal time of the year
There seems to be a common misconception that more suicides occur around Christmas than during the rest of the year. This USA Today article points to the research of Dan Romer of UPenn’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, which suggests that newspaper coverage of suicide around the holidays may be partly responsible for the perpetuation of this myth.
The data gathered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicates that suicide is actually less frequent around the holidays. In 2005, for the 16 states surveyed in the CDC report, December had the lowest suicide rate of any month. In 2006, only February and September had fewer suicides. In both years, November’s suicide rate was only slightly higher than December’s. January was ranked 7th in 2005 and 3rd in 2006.
The prevalence of this holiday suicide myth may be reflective of the fact that, for many Americans, this time of year brings increased stress. For college students, December marks the end of the semester, meaning most likely a greater workload and anxiety about grades. Others are struggling to work with limited resources to come in under the company budget for the year. And for many trades, December marks the beginning of widespread unemployment as the winter weather causes a slowdown in construction. Add to this increased spending for holidays, and it does sound like a recipe for stress.
Despite this, there may be elements of the holiday season which serve as protective measures against suicide. Though Christmas has become an almost entirely secular holiday, the practice of certain traditions may mean that each December, American society is at its most integrated. Decorating, shopping, gift-giving, time off of work and school, family gatherings, special meals, and still, for some, a heightened religious sense- these may all combine to counteract the other factors which make this time of year particularly hard.
Emile Durkheim’s findings regarding suicide and time of year are very similar, but his explanation for the decrease differs. He found that more suicides occur during the day, and hypothesized that in the months when the days are longer, (spring and summer), the suicide rate is higher not because of any direct effect of the weather, but because the longer days and milder weather are more conducive to social activity. In short, he believed there is a direct correlation between the number of suicides and the intensity of “the collective life” of the society.
It seems to me, though, that technology has allowed the “intensity of collective life” to become less dependent upon weather and length of day than it was over a hundred years ago when Durkheim was writing. Because the holiday season is obviously a time when social activity, (as well as economic stress), is very high, I believe that a greater level of social integration may be responsible for the slight dip in the suicide rate.
Posted on December 8, 2009 - by David
19th Century New England Suicide Stats match Durkheim’s Findings
This New York Times article from January 22, 1893, summarizes the findings of the American Statistical Association regarding the rates of suicide in the New England states. It’s an interesting addition to Durkheim’s study, (which largely neglects U.S statistics), since the years covered are nearly the same (the study begins in 1860). Not surprisingly, they find that the rates of suicide increased steadily over this thirty-year period, though with some strange variations in Connecticut. Also, like Durkheim, they find that older males have the highest rate of suicide of any group.
There’s not really a wealth of information here, but the pdf is pretty cool to look at. I’ll be looking for more articles like this one, not for the quality of the information (especially since I can’t even look at the sources), but to gain a better understanding of how subjects like suicide have been represented to the public.
Exploring modern culture and its effects on the mind