The Eastern Corridor has the lowest suicide rate. The Corridor is densely populated – population density correlates negatively with suicide rate – 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’t 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?
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.
The outliers on the East Coast are West Virginia and Vermont. Vermont is New England’s 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’s a hell of a difference.)
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’s something else going on, but I don’t know what. Land settlement patterns? (@kontextmaschine?)
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?
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’d fairly describe as “stubborn old coot”, we’ve got a bunch of those.
So, uh, “out on the frontier we’d rather go out with a bang than a hospital bill”, I guess.
Actually a lot of hardscrabble societies have traditions of the elderly knowingly choosing death, or of their children choosing it for them (often with a disclaimably fuzzy boundary there).
The Eskimo “out on an ice floe” thing is still idiomatic, but I’ve heard “walked into the snow ‘to go hunting’“, deny them fluids to dehydration, overhydrate them to water intoxication, all sorts of poisons
Of course most of the time you wouldn’t have to force it, one in every eight years would be cold enough and food would be scarce enough. You wouldn’t actually freeze or starve mostly, just weaken enough to fall to pneumonia, “the old man’s friend”.
That’s one of the funnier things about when Sarah Palin of Alaska was going on about “death panels” - it’s welfare state shit like Social Security and Medicare and (lesser known) winter heating assistance programs that are the reason that isn’t still a familiar thing
