re: New Study on Rising Suicide Rates Suggests Capitalism Is Quite Literally Killing Us

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It's actually somewhat believable to me that people who have way too much time and luxury on their hands commit suicide more. These people in shithole countries are just trying to stay alive and protect their kids. A macho man in the midwest who struggles with mental illness and gets by I think will think shite through a little more simply due to boredom, and realize the world is awful and they've failed to meet their personal expectations of themselves, obsess over it, and then go and pull the trigger.

7 out of 10 suicide victims in this country are white men. Let that sink in to where there's some truth to this.

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I seem to recall some psychological phenomenon or something like that where happiness and mental illness tend to be founded on relative measures, rather than absolute criteria.

That is, if I have a net worth of $10MM, even though I am wealthier and live a better life than all but 0.0001% of the world and all but 0.0000001% of humans who've ever lived, I will be unhappy/depressed if I live in a community where everyone else was worth $50MM.

People in places like Cuba or Venezuela or most of Africa or wherever just simply can't really conceive of what life is like for the developed world, and many have no real point of reference (other than very remote and intangible things like movies or television shows) for the delta between the material well-being of themselves and the material well-being of an upper middle class family in the U.S. That's not the case at all for people who are struggling either economically or mentally or both in the U.S.

ETA: It's perhaps at least one reason why some of these really poor Central American countries have some of the highest happiness indexes in the world.