{"version": "1.0", "type": "rich", "title": "Utah officials unsure why youth suicide rate has nearly tripled since 2007 | The Salt Lake Tribune", "author_name": "kontextmaschine", "author_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "provider_name": "kontextmaschine", "provider_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "url": "https://kontextmaschine.com/post/152490124058/", "html": "Utah officials unsure why youth suicide rate has nearly tripled since 2007 | The Salt Lake Tribune\n

vzx:

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tentativelyassembled:

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huh. this\u2026 seems to run counter to things that other people have said about Utah

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youth suicide rate double the national average and going up seems like decidedly not a fun time

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though this seems to be a recent-ish thing???

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@pistachi0n, thoughts?

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The Eastern Corridor has the lowest suicide rate. The Corridor is densely populated \u2013 population density correlates negatively with suicide rate \u2013 and it has a strong economy. Utah is sparsely populated and it has a weak economy. Sparse population implies a high rate before 2007; a weak economy implies a rise in the rate after 2007. The Corridor wasn\u2019t hit very hard by the 2008 crash. The entire economy of my part of the swamp revolves around the government. What are they going to do, fire people?

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DC is denser than any state, and it has a lower suicide rate than any state. New Jersey is the densest state, and it has the lowest suicide rate of all the states. New York and Massachusetts are urban areas attached to vast expanses of rural land where nobody lives. Over 80% of the population of Massachusetts lives in Greater Boston, which is about 10% of the area of the state. Over 40% of the population of New York lives in NYC proper.

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The outliers on the East Coast are West Virginia and Vermont. Vermont is New England\u2019s West Virginia, so. (I knew a guy in Vermont when I was 15 or so. Last time I saw him, he gave me a roll of firecrackers and said his dad had heard they were illegal in Maryland and told him to give them to me. On the one hand, this is exactly my shit; on the other hand, the only difference between a hippie and a redneck is that hippies vote Democrat, but in cultural terms, that\u2019s a hell of a difference.)

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The states with the lowest population density are Alaska and Wyoming. The states with the highest suicide rate are Wyoming and Alaska. Utah is #5 for suicide rate and #11 for sparseness. There\u2019s something else going on, but I don\u2019t know what. Land settlement patterns? (@kontextmaschine?)

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Real question is, around half of the population of Oregon lives in the Portland metro area, so why does Oregon have such a high suicide rate?

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Oregon was the first state to approve of physician-assisted suicide, by plebiscite in 1994 (back during the Kevorkian wave of attention).

Also I remember an investigation into the numbers gun control groups were throwing out on firearm deaths that showed a lot of those deaths were suicides by terminally ill or terminally old men you\u2019d fairly describe as\u00a0\u201cstubborn old coot\u201d, we\u2019ve got a bunch of those.

So, uh, \u201cout on the frontier we\u2019d rather go out with a bang than a hospital bill\u201d, I guess.

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