Who’s Okay With Suicide?

Whether or not people approve of the act, suicide happens. Often.

According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, suicide is the 10th leading cause of death, killing 44,193 people per year. the purpose of this article is not to wonder why people kill themselves, or who is most likely to kill themselves, but rather who frowns upon the act of suicide the least in society.

Generally speaking, mental health is a prominent issue in the US. According to data taken from the 2014 General Social Survey (GSS), 35% of respondents reported having at least one day per month (30 days) where they felt that their mental health was poor.

However, despite this, nearly 80% of respondents in the General Social Survey said that people do not have the right to commit suicide if they are “tired of living and ready to die”.

This was curious, so instead of setting out to find the variable that was behind people’s opposition to suicide, we tried to find the people who empathized with suicidal people. Three variables were used in this study: the aforementioned suicide question, age, and frequency of poor mental health. These variables yielded interesting results.

There is an extremely high outlier amongst people have suffer 8 poor mental health days per month, where 75% of respondents approved of the kind of suicide in question (though this could be due to small sample size). However, as the trendline shows, people are less likely to approve of suicide if they spend more days per month in poor mental health (note: I did not run a test of significance on this finding, and therefore it should not be taken as anything more than observation). At first, this seems to be the work of the outlier, but upon further inspection it can be clearly seen that the grouping of approval among those with better mental health is higher than that of those who suffer between 20 and 30 days of poor mental health per month.

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As for the correlation between approval of suicide and age, the results were generally expected, but with some interesting extra data points.

Note the removal of the category “89 or older”. On a linear numeric scale, there is no way to properly weight such a category, and it was consequently omitted. Also note that certain ages had 0% approval because no respondents who answered the question of suicide approval were of those ages.

We suspected that young people in a more progressive social sphere would be more understanding of mental health issues and therefore more approving of suicide. This seems to be correct, but to no apparent measure of statistical significance (again, no test was done). However, we can also see that the elderly tend to have very high approval percentages. Our speculation here is that old people, having lived most of their lives already and often living with assistance or health issues, are a group that is themselves tired of living in some ways, which would explain their empathy with the idea of suicide.

While this data is inconclusive with regards to finding the significant factors involved in empathizing with the idea of suicide, it does shed some interesting light on who may be more accepting of suicide.

(All data used was taken from the 2014 GSS unless otherwise mentioned.)